German umlauts in dialogue windows

Report · Mar 05, 2009

I installed Framemaker 8.0.4 on Solaris.
When I enter german umlauts (or french accents) in any text field of any dialogue window, Framemaker does not echo the umlaut, but a character sequence, e.g. '%X8A', instead of an 'ä' character. This is a bit annoying, because I cannot e.g. search my document for german words containing umlauts. With Framemaker 6 I did not have this problem.
I can cut and paste (with mouse buttons) an 'ä' character from a text editor into a FM text field, which will be echoed correctly. Entering umlauts in the document window also works well.
How can I fix this?

Report · Mar 06, 2009

Hi Martin,

You did not say, whether a search with "%X8A" does find occurrences of ä.

The code is the hex code equivalent of ä - apart from that the hex code should start with \ and your example starts with %. I do not know, whether % is the correct character for Solaris.

On Windows I can search for \x8a and find ä.

All hex codes are listed in Character_Sets.pdf in "documents" in the FrameMaker installation folder. (Possibly the folders have different names on Solaris.)

Best regards

Winfried

Report · Mar 09, 2009

Hi Winfried,
thank you for your reply.

Searching for %X8A does not find an ä, but searching for \x8a does find it. Also when I paste an ä from a text editor into the search field, Framemaker can find it.
Typing the ä-key and then replacing the %X with \x may be a workaround, but I'm not really happy with that.

Report · Mar 17, 2009

Hi Martin,

It seems you are using a non-UTF locale. Pls try using FM on a Solaris UTF8 locale, this might fix the issue.