That which is foreign.
I discovered a new annoyance yesterday. It started with a small joy, as these things often do.
For the Thirteen Ribbons source files, I have been keeping the text to 7-bit clean ASCII. The reason for this was solely because of FurAffinity, which didn't take the codepage into account at all and didn't even bother converting ISO 8859-1 to UTF-8 properly. I suppose that was my fault as much as anything, though they don't mention the situation anywhere in their FAQ.... Anyhow, the point is, I use jEdit to write in. I have a macro set up which converts straight quotes to proper ones, multiple hyphens into dashes, and other such, just before I copy the text into the WordPress post window - the file doesn't even get saved that way.
The catch is, I'd been leaving accents off of things the whole way because I knew FA wouldn't display them correctly. This means that, for example, every instance of "Flosadottir" was actually supposed to have been "Flosadóttir" but didn't show up that way. The part I'm working on has a character with an accent in his first name, and I figured this would be a good time to make the proper shoft of everything to UTF-8 and start putting the accents in. Traditionally, I haven't had to type a lot of accents, so I only have a small handful of character codes memorised, and I key them in like that when necessary - you know, like Alt+0150 for that en-dash. I didn't want to have to add yet more to my repertoire, and I found myself wishing for a Compose key or the like. Then I noticed that my lappy had an "Alt" key and an "Alt Gr" key, and the intuition struck. That's got to be what that's for.
So I gave it a try. And it did nothing that a standard Alt key wouldn't. So I searched online and found a few hints. I actually opened up Windows Help and looked for where to change the keyboard layout, because it wasn't quite obvious at first. I switched it from "United States" to "United States - International". On a test in Notepad, it worked! AltGr+O gave me "ó" as I wanted. Then I went back into jEdit and... nothing.
It turns out that this input method doesn't use the same system as the old Alt-and-character-code system for generating characters, but something new that pretty much no software in the world seems to recognise, so it just plain doesn't do what I need. So... now what? Better system of entering accented letters? Have a character map open at all times? Replace all my software? Give up?
For the Thirteen Ribbons source files, I have been keeping the text to 7-bit clean ASCII. The reason for this was solely because of FurAffinity, which didn't take the codepage into account at all and didn't even bother converting ISO 8859-1 to UTF-8 properly. I suppose that was my fault as much as anything, though they don't mention the situation anywhere in their FAQ.... Anyhow, the point is, I use jEdit to write in. I have a macro set up which converts straight quotes to proper ones, multiple hyphens into dashes, and other such, just before I copy the text into the WordPress post window - the file doesn't even get saved that way.
The catch is, I'd been leaving accents off of things the whole way because I knew FA wouldn't display them correctly. This means that, for example, every instance of "Flosadottir" was actually supposed to have been "Flosadóttir" but didn't show up that way. The part I'm working on has a character with an accent in his first name, and I figured this would be a good time to make the proper shoft of everything to UTF-8 and start putting the accents in. Traditionally, I haven't had to type a lot of accents, so I only have a small handful of character codes memorised, and I key them in like that when necessary - you know, like Alt+0150 for that en-dash. I didn't want to have to add yet more to my repertoire, and I found myself wishing for a Compose key or the like. Then I noticed that my lappy had an "Alt" key and an "Alt Gr" key, and the intuition struck. That's got to be what that's for.
So I gave it a try. And it did nothing that a standard Alt key wouldn't. So I searched online and found a few hints. I actually opened up Windows Help and looked for where to change the keyboard layout, because it wasn't quite obvious at first. I switched it from "United States" to "United States - International". On a test in Notepad, it worked! AltGr+O gave me "ó" as I wanted. Then I went back into jEdit and... nothing.
It turns out that this input method doesn't use the same system as the old Alt-and-character-code system for generating characters, but something new that pretty much no software in the world seems to recognise, so it just plain doesn't do what I need. So... now what? Better system of entering accented letters? Have a character map open at all times? Replace all my software? Give up?