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J
JonasHelgason
Participant
October 15, 2009
Question

Problem with Icelandic special characters on Mac

  • October 15, 2009
  • 1 reply
  • 858 views

Hello

I am working on a Flash publication for students, and I want it to run on Mac as well as PC. Everything goes fine, except a problem with three special characters in my language, Icelandic. I am working on a registration and login page where I am using text boxes and text input boxes. Everything looks correct on PC, but on Mac the characters Þ Ð Ý are lost.

I have tried different fonts etc.

Any idea what is wrong?

Jónas Helgason

    This topic has been closed for replies.

    1 reply

    H
    hordurth
    Participant
    November 10, 2009

    Hello Jónas,

    Did you ever figure this out ?

    I have a similar problem except only with two letters (both upper and lower case).  These two Icelandic letters can't be entered into a Flex TextInput box in the Flex apps I am creating when they are loaded on a Mac.  The letters are known as &Eth, &eth, &Thorn and &thorn in HTML terminology.  Typing these characters on the keyboard results in the following:  { [ ? /

    However I can copy the characters in question from some other app like TextEdit and paste them into a TextInput box in my Flex app and all is well, they show up correctly.

    This happens regardless of the Mac browser used and the Flash plugin version used (have tried both 9 and 10) and also happens in the standalone Flash Player application.

    Does anyone have any idea how to fix this or is this a bug in Flash Player ?  This is really annoying as it makes text input into Flex apps on Icelandic Macs very difficult.

    There must be something wrong with the mapping of keyboard key codes into character codes on the Mac that is causing this.

    Btw, I just heard from a friend that this problem does not exist in MacOS 10.6.  I am running 10.4 and have tested this on 10.5 and it exists on both of those OS versions.

    Rgds,

    Hordur Thordarson

    Lausn hugbunadur

    http://lausn.is

    H
    hordurth
    Participant
    November 10, 2009

    Oops, seems I got a few things wrong...

    It does NOT work in OS X 10.6, and it behaves differently in standalone Flash player than in the Flash browser plugin.

    I just did a little test in Flex and the problem is indeed that the keycodes for these characters are mapped into the wrong characters.  This can be seen here in the output of my little test that grabbed the KeyDown event in a TextInput control and traced out the KeyCode and CharCode:

    KeyCode: 16, CharCode: 0
    KeyCode: 191, CharCode: 63
    KeyCode: 191, CharCode: 47
    KeyCode 16 is the left SHIFT key, keycode 191 is the \ key on US keyboards (the one immediately to the left of the right SHIFT key) but on Icelandic keyboards it is character corresponding to the HTML entity &thorn.  So this key combination should have resulted in an uppercase &thorn character but it results in the question mark character instead, which is what you would get on a US keyboard.
    The second instance of KeyCode 191 is without the SHIFT key which should result in a lowercase &thorn character but instead it results in the backslash character as it would on a US keyboard setup.
    I'm going to file a bug with Adobe about this, this must just be a encoding table glitch that can be easily fixed, at least in Flash Plugin v. 10 and Flash Player.
    Hordur

    J
    JonasHelgasonAuthor
    Participant
    November 11, 2009

    Thank you Hörður, nice to hear I am not alone in the the world! I had almost given up, and was trying different workarounds.

    Please let me know if Adobe manages to solve our little problem!

    Jonas

    jonas@ma.is

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