Re: German characters in SGI files

[Walter Smith <WalterS -at- ILE -dot- COM>]

Jean,
The SGI box is likely using ISO-8859-1 (Latin 1) as its character set for
text files. Your Mac encodes text files in something called the Macintosh
Roman character set. Both of these character sets can handle Western
European languages. Unfortunately, the two aren't seamlessly compatible.

If you have access to a Windows version of Word, you may be able to convert
the file into something usable by opening the *.doc file under Word for
Windows and saving it as "Text only" (_not_ DOS text). This will save the
text in a character set called Windows 1252 (~ANSI), which is a superset of
Latin 1. Provided your document doesn't use any characters that only exist
in the Mac Roman or Win 1252 character sets, this file should display its
characters properly on the SGI box.

Line ending are another problem among platforms. The Mac uses only the
carriage-return character while Unix boxes use only a line-feed character.
Just to complicate things, PCs use both a carriage-return character and a
line-feed character. It's been a while since I've had a Mac as my primary
computer, but there's an shareware application called Drop Strip that fixes
this line ending problem for text files. I can't remember if it handles the
conversion issues for the extended characters though.

Regards,
Walter
----------------------------------------------
Walter L. Smith (walters -at- ile -dot- com)
Emerging Technology Analyst
International Language Engineering Corporation
5700 Flatiron Parkway
Boulder, CO 80301
303-245-7584 (vox)
303-245-7973 (fax)

-----Original Message-----
From: Jean Clougherty [mailto:jean -at- VITALIMAGES -dot- COM]
Sent: Friday, July 24, 1998 2:40 PM
To: TECHWR-L -at- LISTSERV -dot- OKSTATE -dot- EDU
Subject: German characters in SGI files


Hi guys,

I need to put German text into a file that is used by an SGI computer.
The text is currently in a MicrosSoft Word file stored on a Macintosh.
The file includes letters that are not in English, such as vowels with
umlautes over them. I need to put this text into an ascii text file on an
SGI
computer, without losing the international characters.

Here are the things I have tried so far:

I tried doing a Save As to save as a text file. What I got was total
garbage on the SGI.

I tried copying the text from the MS Word file and pasting it into a
SimpleText file. It looks fine in SimpleText on the Mac, but when I put the
SimpleText file on the SGI, the international characters are replaced by a
weird character I had never seen before.

I tried copying it from Word to FrameMaker, and doing a Save As in
FrameMaker, saving as Text Only. The words that contained umualtes were
garbage
on the SGI.

Any help would be very welcome.

Thanks,
Jean

---------------
Jean Clougherty                         E-mail jean -at- vitalimages -dot- com
Technical Writer                       Phone   (515) 472-7726 ext. 106
Vital Images                              Fax      (515) 472-1661
505 N. 4th St.
Fairfield, IA 52556 U.S.A.