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lindaw2396
Known Participant
January 26, 2011
Question

Using MIF I lose the apostrophe. ’ is what FrameMaker wants.

  • January 26, 2011
  • 1 reply
  • 2524 views

Those three characters are what FrameMaker needs to produce a curly apostrophe. MIF needs to use the `string' and so I can't also use the apostrophe ' in a word because it creates conflict since the ' is used in the MIF statement. What is the solution? How do I get my words that contain apostrophes to come into FrameMaker?

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    1 reply

    Michael_Müller-Hillebrand
    Michael_Müller-Hillebrand
    Legend
    January 27, 2011

    LinMarie,

    Welcome to the world of Unicode! I understand you are using FrameMaker 8 or 9 or 10 and your process is based on MIF files created by some other application?

    Since FrameMaker 8 all text strings in MIF are no longer encoded in what was known as the FrameRoman encoding (a variant of the Windows-1252 codepage, mostly identical to the old Mac OS encoding) but in UTF-8. UTF-8 is the encoding used in most XML files and a way to store all Unicode characters in simple text files. The ASCII letters appear as ASCII letters in the UTF-8 encoding, but all others are encoded as multi-byte sequences.

    You are not talking about the Unicode character APOSTROPHE which would be the straight (non-curly) single quote with the unicode value U+0027 (decimal 39). This is the character used to delimit strings in the MIF format and if it is needed inside a string it has to be written as \q. The start-of-string delimiter is the character GRAVE ACCENT U+0060 and would be written as \Q inside strings.

    You seem to be looking for the »curly apostrophe« RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK U+2019. This character is not part of the ASCII character set and therefore encoded as a byte sequence E2-80-99 (decimal: 226-128-153). What you see in a text editor depends on the editor: If it supports UTF-8 it shows you the real character, if it doesn’t it shows you the Windows-1252 equivalents of that byte sequence, which happens to be acircumflex-Euro-trademarkserif.

    Bottom line: Your generating process should be able to create UTF-8 encoded strings. If not, you have to handle them on your own, like entering the required UTF-8 sequences. The danger: If your editor understands UTF-8 and you enter ’, the file will contains the byte sequences for all those three letters…

    I hope that explains the behavior a bit.

    - Michael

    L
    lindaw2396Author
    Known Participant
    January 27, 2011

    Thank you for the explanation. We're using FrameMaker 9 and UltraEdit is our text editor of choice. So ’ will work fine as a curly apostrophe as long as my programmer has no problem replacing the ' in text strings. Could you point me to some resources that would help me in making sure we get other special characters right as we make the transition to MIF and FrameMaker? It sounds like we have to be able to convert special characters from ASCII to Unicode. We also have to make sure that the other method of text import to FrameMaker that we are using - RTF documents out of Word - will work without having to replace certain special characters. The resources I'm looking for need to be pretty basic because I find this all very confusing. A character chart maybe? Thanks for your help!

    Michael_Müller-Hillebrand
    Michael_Müller-Hillebrand
    Legend
    January 28, 2011

    We're using FrameMaker 9 and UltraEdit is our text editor of choice.

    This sounds strange (no offense!) As much as I use UltraEdit as a programming editor, the MIF format is not designed for direct text editing and you may have a hard time making sure everything is fine.

    In general it should be enough to make sure the MIF file is in UTF-8 encoding. The UltraEdit status bar at the bottom of the window tells you the encoding of the current document. If it is DOS you could convert it using the appropriate command in the File menu to "UTF-8 (Unicode editing)" (I have an older German version running, so the wording may be different).

    But the MIF format requires certain restriction which are special to MIF, and those are not handled by any editor (but FrameMaker) automatically. Your developers should have a look at the MIF Reference, available here:

    http://www.adobe.com/devnet/framemaker/online_manuals.html

    HTH,

    - Michael

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