Crosspaltform accented characters

[Leo Van den Brande]

Hi all,

I was glad to see a number of reactions to my question this morning in
the Valentina digest. Thanks a lot Francois, Jon, Martin, Erne, Robert
and Ruslan!

The reactions gave many suggestions, but the whole picture was not yet
clear to me. Therefore, I spent most of the day doing a systematic
investigation which includes all recieved suggestions.

I prepared a small project under Mac OS X with RC 5.2.4, compiled it
for Mac OSX and Windows and tried all combinations of storage and
retrieval before and after moving the database, with and without
defines for different encodings (UTF8, MacRoman and WindowsLatin1)
both for storage and retrieval . I have not tried ConvertEncoding yet.

I did this with a Valentina database, with German as language, created
on the Mac and another one created under Windows. Testing was done
under Mac OS 10.2 and Windows 2000 Professional.

What did I see on the cross-table on both platforms?

Definitions on storage don't influence the results on retrieval on
either platform. This is not surprising, since Ruslan told us that the
database always redefines text to MacRoman on the Mac and
WindowsLatin1 under Wiindows.

On the platform of storage, only if UTF8 was defined on retrieval, the
characters come out right. Any other definition yields garbage.

On the opposite platform, on retrieval from a moved database, after
defining UTF8, under Windows the accented characters are simply not
shown, under Mac OS the text is truncated at the first occurrence of
an accented character. Defining other encodings (MacRoman or
WindowsLatin1) on retrieval yields garbage.

What is going on here?

Is it a RB-problem as suggested by Jon? There is still a lot of
discussion on the NUG-list, but most of that has to do with importing
files with unknown encoding, which is not the case here. Should I post
a question on the NUG?
Or a fontproblem? I use the system font in the editfields, and on the
Mac I also tried arial without success. Unlikely, it seems.
Or something else. But then, what?
Should I go for FixedBinary and VarBinary as Ruslan suggested as an
ultimate escape and competely revamp my database?

Thanks to all for your support!

Leo

Note. I'm surely clumsy with searching the archives. Couldn't find
your messages under "accented letters" , I got them from  the digests,
nor Martin Kloss's postings under "authors". I must be doing something
wrong! Can anybody help a newbee?
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