Multilingual 2Bytes Words Fonts

[Etnadan]

I've waited this upgrade for the Unicode and/or Traditional Chinese for months now. Multilingualism is not among the plus in Filemaker main information page for this version although it seems to be there.

After downloading ver 7 I saw a truly cumbersome way to handle the fonts, nor a real explanation about this matter in the help file. Transferring 2Bytes Chars text from ver 6 delivers unreadable garbage.

Probably because in ver 6 the only way to use 2 Bytes words was importing the 2 Byte Chars in ASCII format and assigning Chinese fonts to specific fields.

Now : I tried to export my Chinese fields from 6 in tab format only. They open properly in Microsoft word and other text programs. Then I convert them to UTF and save as text gaian. As I import them as tab or merge in the new 7 files the program tells me "Conversion" failed". Same with Drag and drop. I don't understand where the integration with Office is ...

In theory my only option is to retype again in Traditional Chinese all my articles ....

Any hints?

Version: v7.x

Platform: Mac OS X Panther

[BobWeaver]

You may be able to find an encoding converter application somewhere. You would have to export the traditional chinese out into a text file, convert it to unicode and then import it back in.

I managed to go the opposite direction using a web browser to do the conversion from Unicode to MacJapanese so that I could display Japanese text in a Filemaker 6 file.

[Etnadan]

I did try already but there are problems: if I export all my Traditional Chinese fields in plain text, I always receive an error message 'conversion failure' although the files were saved in Unicode-text in Microsoft Word. If I import one field at the time convert it in Microsoft Word to Unicode Text it does work about 50% of the time. It never works with Text Edit and the Unicode conversion Utilities (CYclone and so on) are totally useless as the files they generate are always plain garbage.

I think there must be a sequence of two bytes Chars Filemaker 7 doesn't like ... I can't explain the problems in other ways.

THanks for your suggestion

Version: v7.x

[BobWeaver]

Are you using version 7 to export or an older version. I would try to export out using an older version (6 or 5.x) into tab delimited text. Then see what a converter program can do with that. Unicode is still a relatively new animal, and I expect there is a lot of software that claims to work with it but may not. And personally, I wouldn't let MS Word get within a mile of one of my files. MS seems to create their own interpretations of file formats that aren't compatible with anything else.

Also remember there *are* different versions of UTF.