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JMDeGraff

Tips on Entering Diacritical Marks?

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Has anyone managed to use diacritical marks in TMG tags? I have tried using Character Map with various character sets and formats, but without success. I have searched the forums and have tried the few suggestions found there, but again with no success. The language giving me problems is Polish, for example the letter ł. Any suggestions?

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Sorry. :sad: You can enter some diacritical characters, but not that one. As I understand it, you have encountered a limitation due to the Microsoft product (FoxPro) that was used to write TMG. The character you desire is an advanced Unicode character which cannot be entered in FoxPro. I believe FoxPro was the very best and latest software available at the time TMG was written, but it didn't handle Unicode as that wasn't defined yet. And it seems Microsoft has never updated FoxPro to handle Unicode.

 

I feel your pain, as I also have Polish ancestors, and that is a common character I keep wanting to enter. What I have heard is that TMG would require a major and complete re-write to change from FoxPro to some other underlying database engine. Many of us users would really like to have Unicode support within TMG. While I expect (hope?) this will be done some day (soon?), WhollyGenes has not indicated when this might be done. And since the Beta for Version 8 is now publicly available it appears that version also does not (yet?) support Unicode. That Version 8 required a major rewrite of the TMG report generator so it will work on Microsoft's new 64-bit operating systems, but the rewrite to handle Unicode is yet? to come.

 

For the time being, the only (somewhat ugly) workaround I have seen is to enter a unique character string in place of such letters. Later you can do a global search/replace in your word processor to change the string to the desired Unicode character. For example, that character might be entered as the string "U+0142" which is its Unicode number as shown on the Character Map.

 

What I do to limit my choices in the Windows Character Map to non-Unicode characters is click on "Advanced View". Then I change the Character set from "Unicode" to "DOS United States". That way I am not tempted to enter a character that will not work.

 

I am sure that is not what you want to hear, but at least you will now know what you have to do.

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