Re: Mac/PC interoperability

From: Deborah Goldsmith (goldsmith@apple.com)
Date: Wed Aug 23 2000 - 14:13:02 EDT


On Saturday, August 19, 2000, at 08:50 AM, RenE J.V. Bertin wrote:

> I have a preliminary version of the fonts ready. It works, but there seems to be an
> issue with the conversion of the "currency" character and the character replacing it,
> in documents coming from Mac. All other characters are translated correctly, and some
> programs also convert that currency character correctly (i.e. from 0xdb on Mac, to 0xa4
> on PC), but others (e.g. RagTime5) do not. This happens with Word documents, but also
> with RTF files. As far as I have been able to determine, the reverse direction, PC -> Mac
> goes without problems.
> In addition, Word97 on PC does not perform any of the necessary conversions on Macintosh
> RTF
> at all!
>
> Is there anyone who has experience with this kind of problem in general? What is the
> matter with that one specific character? I contacted the RagTime help desk (they were
> very kind, even though I only have a demo version), and they suggested me to ask "somebody
> at unicode", since their program uses unicode internally.
>

In Mac OS 8.5, the definition of 0xDB in the MacRoman character set changed from U+00A4 (currency sign) to U+20AC (Euro). Mac OS 8.5 and later treat 0xDB as the Euro.

If you are omitting characters that don't translate, then perhaps you should omit this one...

I hope this helps.

Deborah Goldsmith
Manager, International Toolbox Group
Apple Computer, Inc.
goldsmith@apple.com



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