ScribeFileAsText not returning ballot box character

[amallison]

A client has a word document (see attached sample) that has responses to questions.

They use a 'dingbat' font to show a selection box (Ballot Box).

When selected the document has the 'ballot box with check' character. ie a square with a tick in it.

Scribe returns the 'ballot box', 'ballot box with check' & 'ballot box with x' as a left bracket "(".

Can this be changed to return the appropriate characters or characters to distinguish the difference?

Word Tick Box.doc.zip

[wbasham]

Dingbats are simply a font, much like Arial or Times New Roman. There are ASCII codes behind that representing characters. It sounds like that is what's happening here, Scribe is using the code and it maps to a character, "(" for example, not to a particular font. I'm not sure what your goal here is, or which functions of Scribe you'd like to use. If you can elaborate I'll be happy to see if there's a workaround.

[amallison]

I'm using the 'ScribeFileAsText' function to extract the text from a Word document and then parse out the required data into FileMaker fields.

The attached file in the first post shows the characters in question. The first section of the file shows the data in question. The middle section shows the result when pasted in as unformated text. The last section has the numbers that FileMaker returns if you put the characters into FileMaker's Code(text) function.

Sorry the reference to a 'dingbat font' was wrong.

[Raybaudi]

You could try something like this:

Substitute ( YourText ; [ Char ( 61694 ) ; Char ( 9632 ) ] ; [ Char ( 61603 ) ; Char ( 9633 ) ] )

[amallison]

Thanks but this doesn't work as ScribeFileAsText converts Char ( 61694 ) & Char ( 61603 ) to Char ( 40 ) before being able to interact with the text.

[wbasham]

Are you calling ScribeFileAsText( your file ) with "your file" being a file or container field? What does this function call return? The middle section of the attached document? And are you attempting to store the checkboxes in FileMaker fields? I'm sorry, I'm still a little confused about what you are trying to do.

[wbasham]

It looks like these are non-Unicode characters supported by Webdings (it appears the numbers may vary).

http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/font/wingdings/nonunicode.htm

Scribe is unable to support these characters in that case.

[amallison]

I'm using ScribeFileAsText on a file stored with SuperContainer.

I get the following result on the text in question (the top part of my document):

Yes (go to vocation section)No ( (see below)Yes (No ( About to start (Start date / /