special characters

[martinwcole]

am working on an app where there will be a lot of characters for engineering to be placed in character fields - client is coming from Alpha DOS, and apparently Alpha DOS lets you use the alt key to input from the extended ascii character set, whreas apparently Alpha 5 does not.

how do others deal with this kind of issue?

[John Lemisch]

RE: special characters

I use them all the time
� = alt+0169
� = alt+0149

[whanigsberg]

RE: special characters

Martin,

Also check out the "toolbars" application note on the Alpha Learning Center page. Ed Larrabee's doc develops a methodology for automating field insertions which you should find helpful.

Bill

[martinwcole]

RE: special characters

Bill,

using Ed's toolbar, I discovered the following:

I can create the custom button for chr(241) [+ over -]
and the toolbar editor recognizes 241 and puts the correct text in the toolbar

but if I use chr(241) in the code, it displays an incorrect character. But if I use chr(177) it displays the correct character. I have no problem with using 177 instead of 241 in the toolbar script, but I fear it is an Alpha error that it is getting the wrong character for chr(241) and that if they "fix it" later then the code will fail.

try this
for i=1 to 257
trace.writeln(i + " " + chr(i))
next

then note that the characters it is displaying/writing are not always the correct ascii characters.

I figured out that the reason a field will not accept alt-241 in a field on my form was because I had some onkey code for "{esc}"

I put the following code at the top of onkey and now it works
if this.active()="location"
end
end if

[martinwcole]

RE: special characters

bump

[csda1]

RE: special characters

Martin,

The character displayed for any particular chr() code is dependent on the font of the object. Go to Start, Programs, Accessories, System Tools, Character Map and you can then see the mappings of the various fonts. If you need to change fonts within an object, it may be necessary to use an RTF object.

Regards,

Ira

[martinwcole]

RE: special characters

Thanks ever so much Ira - I would never have even thought of that!

[whanigsberg]

RE: special characters

Martin,

Is Ed's methodology working in the context of your application. Have you adapted it in any interesting ways?

Thanks,
Bill

[martinwcole]

RE: special characters

Good question - here is what I am doing, but I haven't finished yet.

I am going to get a complete list from the client of the "special characters" he is going to need - mostly stuff like degrees, +/-, and regular engineering/math stuff.

The I am going to create a table containing the characters (for displaying) and the chr(values).

Then, on all appropriate forms I'll give the user a constant F-key like F12 to pop a dialog showing the characters, letting them scroll and enter or doublelclick to select, get the chr(value) in a variable and use a variation of Ed's code to insert it.

What I hope to do is before they depart the field object(to press F12) is get the field-object name and cursor position in variables and put the code in the onkeycode for F12.

like they are in the field and have typed "360" - and if they press the F12 key, let them scroll to select the degree symbol, go back to the field and automatically insert it.

If I get that to work seamlessly, I'll send you a copy, but I have been too busy to work on it so far.

Unless I had a table for every possible chr(value) for every possible font, I'll have too be sure to ALWAYS use the same font in apprpriate fields.

But for now I am just letting them use, e.g., alt241.

[whanigsberg]

RE: special characters

Thanks for the interim report. It's an interesting problem. The minute you mentioned it I realized I would have to face it one day.

best wishes,
Bill