How to export records with 2 Bytes encoding

October 21, 200322 yr

Newbies

My DB are simple: film lists with text field only in English and Traditional Chinese. FMP (6.04) doesn't really cope too well with Traditional Chinese. To get a readable sentence, my field in 2Bytes encoding needs to be twice as long as the space occupied by the Chinese words. However this works, except for the "Find" mode as 2 Bites encoding uses chars out of the accepted program range.

However I manage to type Chinese and read it.

The problem is the export as I need to generate HTML pages.

I use Jaguar and tested Panther. Neither of them returns me a tab delimited file I can successfully convert in Traditional Chinese. I used Word, and everything else with no success. The text files from Filemaker pro stay full of garbage where I should read Chinese no matter how I change the font.

This does not happen if I use Simple Text from system 9.

The process goes as follows: export as tab delimited my records. Change the font in Simple Text to any Chinese Font (Taipei , or Apple LiGothic). Selecting everything works just fine as Chinese fonts include western fonts, then clipboard the lot to paste it into Word. Word understand the file is encoded in Chinese and I get my English fields in English, and my Chinese fields in traditional Chineset.

In Word I create an HTML file which I layout and clean up in Golive.

However this process is not only very long, but it ties me to older machines. Jaguar nor Panther seem to be able to convert the text files from FMP in Traditional Chinese. I tried everything. Not a single word processor will deliver readable files. The Chinese fields are plain garbage, and there is no way to go beyond that. I tried with no success several so called translators, unicode systems and all the rest.

Any hints anybody ... I promised my student a bilingual web site, But unless I use an old machine and both operating systems I cannot fulfill my promise.

Thanks from Taiwan

Dantz

October 21, 200322 yr

Although it doesn't help you yet, the rumour is that Filemaker version 7 will handle non-roman text encoding (ie., Unicode etc.) which should make the job a lot easier.

Meanwhile, you might be able to automate the process somewhat using Applescript. Also, have you tried using the WorldText application instead of SimpleText. Don't know if it offers any advantages, but it might.