Another Degree Symbol Bug

[lalcaraz]

When 9.5 came out there was a bug that would cause any Lighting Instruments with the Degree Symbol to change to rectangles because VW did not understand that symbol and thus the symbol name (ie Source 4's)

I know that Kevin fixed this problem and it is integral in 9.5.1 but I now have a new, related bug.

If I am using the stock ETC symbols with the Degree Symbol in the name and I export it into Lightwright and then back into VW, the degree symbol changes from a small circle to a box, thus whehn I refresh, all Source 4's turn into rectangles.

In LW, the degree symbol is fine, and in the expoted "text" file, the degree symbol is fine but when that text file goes into VW, it changes it to a box.

Any fix for this?

One other problem that I do not understand is that the stock Altman 8" Fresnel symbol does the same thing but the name of the symbol and the name in the symbol name field appear to match but it stays as a rectangle until I use "replace with active symbol"

Thanks

Lonnie

[kmoore1]

quote:

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Originally posted by lalcaraz:

In LW, the degree symbol is fine, and in the expoted "text" file, the degree symbol is fine but when that text file goes into VW, it changes it to a box.

Any fix for this?

Lonnie

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One quick way to prevent this it to not pass the symbol name field back and forth to Lightwright. This poses problems if you're changing fixture types in Lightwright though. I'll look into this and see if I can duplicate the problem on this end.

[lalcaraz]

Kevin

Passing the Symbol Name Field and the Use Legends Field is a very useful thing to do, so that when Orphans come in, they are complete.

I spoke with a friend who uses Spotlight on a network with an Equal amount of PC's and Mac's and he say's that the exact same thing happens to the Degree Symbol when transferring from Mac to PC or vise versa. Thus it is not just a LW/VW thing.

Let me know what you find out

Thanks

Lonnie

[kmoore1]

quote:

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Originally posted by lalcaraz:

Kevin

I spoke with a friend who uses Spotlight on a network with an Equal amount of PC's and Mac's and he say's that the exact same thing happens to the Degree Symbol when transferring from Mac to PC or vise versa. Thus it is not just a LW/VW thing.

Lonnie

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All the standard text characters like letters, numbers, etc are assigned an ascii value which is what the computer actually stores. For the first 128 ASCII characters both mac and windows use the same codes for the same letters. Everything works great. Unfortunately there is an extended ASCII Character set that covers another 128 characters. Most of the special symbols and old ascii line art stuff falls in this range. Of course our good friends Bill and Steve decided that the PC and Mac should use different ascii values for different characters in this extended set. Because of this you have to know the originating platform of the file and do a character mapping to translate the character code appropriately for your platform. If the application doesn't know the originating platform of the file it will incorrectly map the characters and choose the wrong character.

This is what is causing these headaches. Because we have a cross platform product we have to do character mapping between platforms in order to handle these characters. This mapping code seems to be breaking down somewhere and either isn't mapping characters correctly or more likely is assumining the wrong originating platform.

I'll keep you posted about my findings.

[lalcaraz]

Kevin

Thanks for the info. I hope you can resolve it.

Why would this be happening on the same machine when importing/exporting from Lightwright to Vectorworks?

Thanks

Lonnie

[kmoore1]

quote:

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Originally posted by lalcaraz:

Kevin

Thanks for the info. I hope you can resolve it.

Why would this be happening on the same machine when importing/exporting from Lightwright to Vectorworks?

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Because they are both cross-platform apps and are both performing some sort of character mapping when writing and reading info. Someone isn't doing the right thing and that's causing the problem. Most likely we're doing something wrong in our mapping because most of Vectorworks assumes a "macintosh" baseline.