Beware of strange characters
June 15th, 2007I have a colleague in the office who happens to live a few miles down the road from me. She commented this morning that she’d waved at me through the window a couple of times this week but I hadn’t noticed. She said I looked completely absorbed by something on my laptop.
That’s putting it mildly. What I was doing was just a simple piece of mail merging to produce the programme for the OpenOffice.org Conference from abstracts and biographies submitted to a website by prospective speakers. Really, really, easy – except that this is an international conference, and many speakers have accented letters (é ó ú etc) in their names and biographies.
I didn’t realise what a minefield I was entering by leaving the comfort zone of my English mother tongue. I needed to download a csv from the website into Calc, tidy up the raw data a bit, and then load it into a MySQL database for safe keeping. From there I could extract it into Writer for a mail merge. Easy in English. Trying to do the same without screwing up at least some of the characters somewhere in the process has so far eluded me completely. I’ve come up with a result which is 95% correct, but there are still a few characters that are getting scrambled.
In my idle moments, I have sometimes wondered how a small island nation managed to establish the biggest empire the world has ever seen – and why that role has now been largely taken over by the US. I now know the reason. Having a language like English with no “strange characters” makes life so simple that you have plenty of energy left over for world domination.
Meanwhile, if anyone can give me an idiot’s guide for setting up a PC to cope with real-world languages I’ll be very grateful. Until then, apologies to any Conference presenters whose names are still incorrect in the draft Programme. I really tried hard – ask my colleague at work!
June 17th, 2007 at 7:37 am
I think the same way, spanish is a great and simple language, but the stress sings have to go. That looks like a phonetic guide that is only useful if you don’t know the language.
On the flipside I was amazed when I tried to read romanian where they have even more stress signs that seem to escape the way words are typed on a comptuer.
Anyway the easiest way to get stress signs in OOo is by using the special characters(or was it symbols) in Insert menu.
HTML becomes even more archaic when you have to put somehting like & + ” + ‘acute’ + ‘;’ for a á.