"You step in the stream
But the water has moved on
This page is not here."
Random heiku

The xplorer² 64 bit conversion project is nearly done and soon there will be betas flying around for people to test. I am not sure there will be a market for it as the capitalist system seems to be crumbling down... all we can do is be patient and persevere.

Turning to more mundane matters, the other day we've seen about editor² which I personally use for all simple text editing tasks, including this blog and managing the website. Even longer ago I discussed code pages, an old fashioned method to fit regional languages (characters and symbols) within the 255 character range of the old ASCII encoding table. Putting the two together, today's subject is how to edit non-english plain text files.

English speaking users seldom come across language related issues. Even the rest of us (greeks, slovaks, chinese and the rest of the tower of babel) when using complex text editing tools like MS Word, won't realize any problems since the document is automatically saved as unicode, which has spaces for 64K different symbols. But try to save a plain HTML page in mixed greek/english and you may find yourself full of question marks.

There are several options to achieve correct regional plain text file encoding with tools like notepad or editor²

• Set the default ANSI code page in control panel to the language you use most often
   
• Save text files in unicode format. In editor² pick File > Save as and select unicode from Save as type drop-down box. The drawback is that the file size immediately doubles!
   
• Use View > Code page to select your language code (1253 is greek, check this table for other languages).

More clarifications in today's demo video

Καλημέρα κόσμε!

Post a comment on this topic