No Update Complaint

[Mike Olds]

Hello Helios,

I really hate the fact that I have been pushed to the point of saying 'ouch'. I have been waiting for a fix to the CLIP BOOK bug that prevents it from saving Unicode Characters now for more than a year in the supposedly Unicode compliant TextPad 8.

This is the single most valuable and unique to TextPad tool for me I am being seriously ham-strung by the inability to use it.

Is this fair to your users that purchased a new version specifically because it was billed as Unicode compliant?

Apologies for being grouchy, but I need that functionality. Life would have been easier for me if I had not upgraded from 7 and changed 8,000 files to Unicode in the expectation that this would work as billed.

[MudGuard]

Which clipboard bug?

[ben_josephs]

Do you mean Unicode characters that are not ASCII or ISO 8859 or Windows 1252 characters? I also would be interested to know what bug you're referring to. I have many files containing such characters that I edit in TextPad, and I often copy and paste them into and out of TextPad.

Here are some Greek characters in a box:

Code: Select all

�����������������
â�‚ Καλ�Œ α�€�ŒÎ³Îµ�…μα â�‚
�����������������

I just entered them into a document in TextPad and saved them in a file. I closed the file and re-opened it. I copied the characters and pasted them into documents in UltradEdit and MS Word. I copied them again from those documents and pasted them back into the document in TextPad. Everything worked perfectly.

[Mike Olds]

Greetings,

Sorry, I am speaking about the Clip Books. The Bug is that although one can copy material with Unicode characters, and paste into a new Clip Book, Save the Clip Book and close Text Pad and reopen it and look at the Clip Book. Unicode characters reverted to ASCII.

The Clip Book feature does not retain Unicode characters.

[Mike Olds]

OK, so you are wondering what the big deal is. What is so important to me about the Clip Book tool?

As I said I have thousands of files I am cleaning up/editing. Those files represent the digital conversion of some 25 hard copy volumes. In those hard copy volumes there are some 84,000 'stories'. Those stories exist in from three to five translations and an original language version. In each of the stories In the original language version and in the first of the translations there are numerous repeted passages. Those passages are currently represented by '...' or '... pe ...' or '... la ...' all of which mean: "repeat the previous similar passage". As well as editing the work as a whole for errors, I am also inserting the repeated passages. Those repetitions are also found across each book and across the entire 25 volumes (that is 25 volumes for the original and for each translation). The key word here is repetition. Do you start to see the picture? It was the ability to take an edited or omitted repeated passage for a given translation and use it across the 84,000 stories that first bound me to TextPad and which, not being available, is now a serious impediment to completion of my job.

So basically that is the big deal. May I ask what the big deal is fixing this problem?

I mean if I am to happily resign myself to doing all this work one shot at a time (these repetitions do not identify themselves such that the job could be done by search and replace, they must be examined and a choice made, then the correct repetition inserted in each case individually), my mind would be much more at ease if I understood the problem. Even if it comes down to you guys are now so fat and happy that work seems intolerable, I could accept that if I knew. At least I could argue that the work should be made open source so that others could work on the problem.

Maybe the problem is so complex that it is a matter of a complete re-design of the whole and for some reason that is out of the question. I could live with that too.

What is too frustrating is just nothing. No responses at all.

Do I need to play the 'Old Man' card? I am 78. I have been using TP for more than sixteen years. Paid versions. Time, you can imagine, presses.

Not angry. Disappointed.

[ben_josephs]

I'm not sure I understand correctly what you're trying to do.

I believe you are searching for occurrences of certain fixed strings, and replacing each of them with a piece of text that can only be determined in each instance by inspection of the context. And I believe the problem is that the replacements are in a clip book and contain non-ASCII characters that the clip book mechanism doesn't enter into the document correctly.

If that is correct, for each replacement, instead of the correct text, you might enter some short, distinct marker string that doesn't otherwise occur in the text. This anyway might well be quicker than finding the correct text in the clip book. You could then run a small command-line script (written in Perl, Python or whatever) that replaces the markers with the correct pieces of text in all the files in one go. This two-stage process has the added advantage that it makes changing your mind about the replacements or correcting errors very simple.

But I may have misunderstood your requirements.

[MudGuard]

The clip book does not store Unicode.

Ben, try copying the Unicode (non-ASCII-) stuff into a new clip book. Save the clip book. Leave textpad. Restart textpad. Paste from clip book to document - unicode is lost ...

[ben_josephs]

MudGuard - Yes, I am aware of that. I mentioned it in my post, and it is why my suggestion avoids using the clip book.

[Mike Olds]

Good Morning,

Ben: You have understood the problem correctly, but your solution is beyond me and would not work in this case anyway. EDIT: I see that it would work, but it looks to me like it would be just as much work as what I was doing. I have this stuff in my head and can make adjustments on the fly from memory. Still, I do need to think of something.

The way I was set up previously I had no problem locating the clips in the clib books the way I hve them organized. The thing is there needs to be five or six different sets: one for each translator and one for the original language.

Again, scripts are a dimension above my station.

Further, when I say 3 or more translators I am making it simpler than it is. The most important set (counted as 1) actually has 5 translators, so each sub-set in that is worded slightly differently. Additionally, translators are inconsistent within so even repeated passages by the same translator are inconsistent.

But thank you both for your interest, much appreciated.

[ben_josephs]

If the solution has to be entirely within TextPad you might create your own alternative clip book using ordinary text files.

[Mike Olds]

Hello Ben,

Yes, I have thought of that. As it stands at the moment it looks like the easiest solution is when I check back in the text to see what the repeated passage should be, to copy that and paste it in.

Waste of time as I usually know what the missing passage should say and checking back is the waste.

However I will play around with your solution and see how it works.

Thanks again for your thoughts.