SL and Ext. B chars in Java text editors

[Jens Østergaard Petersen]

I waited with my SL update until I thought all the wrinkles had been ironed out, but there seems to be one left ….

In all the Java-based text editors I have tried out, Ext. B characters refuse to show up. Ext. A chars are fine - and, of course, Ext. B chars are fine in apps that are not Java-based.

Does anyone have a clue? I am heavily dependent on Oxygen!

Cheers,

Jens

Mac OS X 10.6.2

java version "1.6.0_15"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_15-b03-219)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 14.1-b02-90, mixed mode)

[Amnon Yaish]

Jens,

Have you tried installing Java 5 on your SL and setting it as the
preferred version to see if that solves the problem?

This might not be a java only problem; SL has apparently introduced
some changes in the way its interacts with fonts which is giving
headaches to many people. I have myself avoiding crossing to SL for
that reason, and for example, I have a Unicode TT font displaying
perfectly on Leopard in FileMaker Pro, but its ext.B chars and Private
Use Area chars do not display in the same FMP app in SL ...

Amnon.



On Nov 25, 8:38 am, Jens Østergaard Petersen <oest...@gmail.com>
wrote:

[Kerim Friedman]

What does SL stand for?

What is Oxygen?

Excuse my ignorance.

kerim

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[Amnon Yaish]

SL is Snow Leopard.

oXygen is one of the best, most complete and cross-platform xml
editors available. See <http://www.oxygenxml.com/>

Amnon.

On Nov 25, 10:14 am, Kerim Friedman <oxus...@gmail.com> wrote:
> What does SL stand for?
>
> What is Oxygen?
>
> Excuse my ignorance.
>
> kerim
>

> On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 4:54 PM, Amnon Yaish <amnon.ya...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Jens,
>
> > Have you tried installing Java 5 on your SL and setting it as the
> > preferred version to see if that solves the problem?
>
> > This might not be a java only problem;  SL has apparently introduced
> > some changes in the way its interacts with fonts which is giving
> > headaches to many people. I have myself avoiding crossing to SL for
> > that reason, and for example, I have a Unicode TT font displaying
> > perfectly on Leopard in FileMaker Pro, but its ext.B chars and Private
> > Use Area chars do not display in the same FMP app in SL ...
>
> > Amnon.
>
> > On Nov 25, 8:38 am, Jens Østergaard Petersen <oest...@gmail.com>
> > wrote:
> >> I waited with my SL update until I thought all the wrinkles had been ironed out, but there seems to be one left ….
>
> >> In all the Java-based text editors I have tried out, Ext. B characters refuse to show up. Ext. A chars are fine - and, of course, Ext. B chars are fine in apps that are not Java-based.
>
> >> Does anyone have a clue? I am heavily dependent on Oxygen!
>
> >> Cheers,
>
> >> Jens
>
> >> Mac OS X 10.6.2
>
> >> java version "1.6.0_15"
> >> Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_15-b03-219)
> >> Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 14.1-b02-90, mixed mode)
>
> > --
> > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Chinese Mac group.

> > For answers to frequently-asked questions, visithttp://www.yale.edu/chinesemac

[Jens Østergaard Petersen]

Thanks a lot, Amnon!

I followed the instructions on <http://wiki.oneswarm.org/index.php/OS_X_10.6_Snow_Leopard> and now things more or less work as before.

Oxygen has never been perfect with Ext. B characters (at least on my computer). The cursor used to move two steps over an Ext. B character (which could therefore be broken), but now - strangely - only one step is required, though now the cursor position is skewed like it was in Word in the old days. There are still some weird things: out of the first 64 Ext. B characters, 5 refuse to show if they are alone on a line, but they do show if a space is added to the line!

I lived with such quirks twenty years ago, so I guess I can live with them now ….

jEdit behaves more or less like Oxygen 11, but editX 2009 and XMLmind show all chars, even with no spaces on the lines.

I didn't check whether Ext. B and PUA chars showed up in FileMaker before my change of Java environment, but they do now.

The bad thing is that Sun does not support Java 5 any more. Why this lack of support for these parts of Unicode in Java? Why the lack of support for Java on Mac OS?

Thanks,

Jens

> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Chinese Mac group.

> For answers to frequently-asked questions, visit http://www.yale.edu/chinesemac

[Jens Østergaard Petersen]

"SL" stands for "Snow Leopard". Oxygen is an XML editor <http://www.oxygenxml.com/>.

Sorry!

Jens

[Amnon Yaish]

I'm really not an expert on these things, but maybe it is rather a SL
problem not a Java problem (and Java 6 Mac Machine still functioning
the 10.5 way). Since it is affecting my project and there will be no
escaping SL, I'll try to clarify the subject a little more and let the
list know if I succeed.

Amnon.


On Nov 25, 11:22 am, Jens Østergaard Petersen <oest...@gmail.com>
wrote:
> ...The bad thing is that Sun does not support Java 5 any more. Why this lack of support for these parts of Unicode in Java? Why the lack of support for Java on Mac OS?
> ...

[Joe Wicentowski]

On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 4:43 AM, Amnon Yaish <amnon...@gmail.com> wrote:
> oXygen is one of the best, most complete and cross-platform xml
> editors available. See <http://www.oxygenxml.com/>

oXygen is a gem of a tool - for anyone who needs to edit XML, query or
transform XML with XQuery or XSLT, validate XML with XML Schema or
Schematron. I use oXygen to author documents in TEI
(http://tei-c.org) - a flavor of XML that's widely used for humanities
text encoding projects. oXygen has a good academic/personal use
license ~ somewhere around $50 the last time I checked.

Amnon - I've found oXygen's developers to be extremely responsive to
feedback, via their forum or support e-mail or twitter. I'd suggest
contacting them with any questions like this.

TEI powers several Chinese text projects, including Stone Sutras
(http://www.stonesutras.org/ ; unfortunately, it requires a login).
See also A Digital Comparative Edition and Translation of the Shorter
Chinese Saṃyukta Āgama
(http://www.tei-c.org/Activities/Projects/di06.xml) and Chinese TEI
(http://buddhistinformatics.ddbc.edu.tw/~mb/webclassmb/teiWorkshop/indexTei.html).

Incidentally, a topic we haven't covered here are XML databases that
are Mac-compatible -- in case you ever need to do text mining or
searching. The one I use is called eXist (http://exist-db.org); it
handles UTF-8 perfectly and is quite speedy. I'm happy to entertain
any questions about TEI, eXist, or XQuery.

Joe

[Amnon Yaish]

Hi Joe,
I also use eXist, and am quite satisfied with it. Normally we use a
custom developed client for our data with our own dtd (it is a chinese-
french database/dictionary), but occasionally we also use oXygen,
especially for special xQueries; (I guess we underuse it). However I
still haven't found any tool to compare with the late FrameMaker (on
Mac) for ease of use and wysiwyg editing of xml/sgml.
Amnon.

On Nov 25, 4:44 pm, Joe Wicentowski <joe...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> oXygen is a gem of a tool - for anyone who needs to edit XML, query or
> transform XML with XQuery or XSLT, validate XML with XML Schema or
> Schematron.  I use oXygen to author documents in TEI
> (http://tei-c.org) - a flavor of XML that's widely used for humanities
> text encoding projects.  oXygen has a good academic/personal use
> license ~ somewhere around $50 the last time I checked.
>
> Amnon - I've found oXygen's developers to be extremely responsive to
> feedback, via their forum or support e-mail or twitter.  I'd suggest
> contacting them with any questions like this.
>
> TEI powers several Chinese text projects, including Stone Sutras
> (http://www.stonesutras.org/; unfortunately, it requires a login).
> See also A Digital Comparative Edition and Translation of the Shorter
> Chinese Saṃyukta Āgama
> (http://www.tei-c.org/Activities/Projects/di06.xml) and Chinese TEI

> (http://buddhistinformatics.ddbc.edu.tw/~mb/webclassmb/teiWorkshop/ind...).

[Jens Østergaard Petersen]

Well, I might as well chime in - the overlap of interests and instruments is perhaps not accidental, but I have also started on the same road, converting Chinese texts into TEI and thinking of how to serve them and a lexical database of Old Chinese with eXist - and I know there are other listers with similar inclinations!

Do you have any answers to the Java/Ext. B problem, Joe - or do you deal with it by not upgrading to Snow Leopard?

Luckily, eXist chooses its own Java environment, overriding the Mac OS preferences.

Cheers,

Jens

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> For answers to frequently-asked questions, visit http://www.yale.edu/chinesemac

[Joe Wicentowski]

Hi Amnon and Jens,

On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 12:13 PM, Amnon Yaish <amnon...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I also use eXist, and am quite satisfied with it.

2009/11/25 Jens Østergaard Petersen <oes...@gmail.com>:

> Well, I might as well chime in - the overlap of interests and instruments is perhaps not accidental, but I have also started on the same road, converting Chinese texts into TEI and thinking of how to serve them and a lexical database of Old Chinese with eXist - and I know there are other listers with similar inclinations!

Wow - I had no idea! This is good to hear.

> Do you have any answers to the Java/Ext. B problem, Joe - or do you deal with it by not upgrading to Snow Leopard?

Unfortunately, no; I haven't hit this issue myself. Re-reading your
first message, I see that the issue is with Snow Leopard and not with
oXygen. Amnon - do you have a link to any apple discussion pages on
this? Perhaps we can add our two cents to the discussion.

Joe

[Amnon Yaish]

If you google for Snow Leopard font problems or similar you will find
*many* results.
However I haven't found any specific discussion related to ext.B (or
to PUA), probably because the number of people on this planet using
ext.B chars on SnowLeopard is ... not very big, and maybe all of them
on this list! Most of the issues are related to font spacing or other
metrics related issues.
As I haven't yet installed SL I haven't thoroughly explored the
problem yet, but I plan to do it in the next few weeks.
Amnon.

[Andrew Main]

For discussion of Snow Leopard font issues, see:

"Bugs & Fixes: Font problems in Snow Leopard" (Macworld)
<http://www.macworld.com/article/143116/2009/10/
fontproblems_snowleopard.html>

"Altered Font Spacing Crippling for Designers" (Apple Discussion)
<http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2136944>

The problems seem to have resulted from the final replacement of the
old ATSUI text engine with the new Core Text, which apparently did not
include complete support for PostScript Type 1 fonts; as we know,
Apple is never laggard in abandoning support for technologies it
considers "obsolete" (such as creator codes in file metadata*), and it
seems Adobe officially deprecated PS T1 in favor of OpenType some
years back. However, apparently a few foot-dragging graphics types
have not yet seen fit to spend the $thousands necessary to replace
their Adobe Type Libraries with the new OpenType versions (and replace
the former with the latter in every job they've ever done), and they
were caught short (in some cases disastrously) by SL's aggressive
forward move.

10.6.2 seems to have solved most, though not all, of the font
problems. Whether Apple will see it as worthwhile to address the rest
remains to be seen. The emphasis these days (aside from iPhone, which
according to John Gruber will soon be Apple's primary business**)
seems to be mostly on attracting everyday Windoze users and making Mac
OS comfortable for them (the apparent rationale behind the abandonment
of "confusing" creator codes).

Anyway, one key to dealing with font problems seems to be clearing
font caches, which can be done with the dedicated shareware utility
Font Finagler
<http://homepage.mac.com/mdouma46/fontfinagler>,
or with the free (donations well deserved) OnyX
<http://www.titanium.free.fr/pgs/english.html>.

(Several years ago the developer of Font Finagler mentioned on a forum
that he was thinking of adding the ability to edit font suitcases,
missing from the Mac world since OS 9; appears he has done so in the
latest version -- though seems it's not yet finished and available.
Assuming it does what I want when it is, it'll certainly be worth $10
to me.)

I don't know if any of this is relevant to the font problems discussed
in this thread, but I thought it might be of interest.

Meanwhile, the very latest fix-everything version of OS X still
doesn't include the one thing I was hoping to see (and have been
awaiting since 10.2): OpenType support for complex South and Southeast
Asian scripts (e.g. Devanagari, Tibetan).

I haven't tried SL yet either; judging from the forums at MacInTouch,
it appears to be an even more problematical upgrade than either 10.4
or 10.5. Of course millions of casual users have upgraded with no
problems, but it looks like anyone whose needs go beyond a trip to the
corner store for a quart of milk (metaphorically speaking) had better
keep a good 10.5 backup to revert to. I'm going to try it on an
external disk first (someone at MacInTouch posted instructions how to
enable two System setups to access/use the same Home folder).

* SL officially ignores creator codes, to the considerable ire of a
sizable number of long-time Mac users (myself included); see:

"Snow Leopard Snubs Document Creator Codes" (TidBITS)
<http://db.tidbits.com/article/10537>

"C:\ONGRTLNS.OSX" (John Gruber)
<http://daringfireball.net/2009/10/congrtlns-osx>

As someone remarked at MacInTouch, "I guess Avie Tevanian and the NeXT
developers have won in the end."

** (Along with, of course, music and other entertainment marketing)

Andrew Main

[Jens Østergaard Petersen]

WIth the Java for Mac OS X 10.6 Update 1 <http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3892>, available through Software Update, some of the problems I mentioned in my posting in the beginning of this thread appear to have disappeared. I think that Ext. B characters now display better in oXygen in Snow Leopard than in Leopard, though there still remain some silly problems.

I have found no indication that these font issues were targeted by the update. The update is surely mostly a (belated) answer to the security-related problems of Java on Mac OS; the information about its contents is surprisingly meagre.

Probably because I installed the Leopard Java on Snow Leopard, following <http://wiki.oneswarm.org/index.php/OS_X_10.6_Snow_Leopard>, my SE 5 is completely inoperative and had to be deactivated in the Java Preferences, but SE 6 functions well.

Though the position of the insertion mark is still skewed by 50% with Ext. B characters (just like all Chinese characters were when I started using a Mac with Word 4 in 1989!), the characters do not break on Snow Leopard in oXygen, like they did on Leopard. If I have to choose between a correct position of the insertion in Leopard with breakable characters, and an incorrect position of the insertion in Snow Leopard with unbreakable characters, I would choose the latter.

All Ext. B characters now display if alone on a line, but there are some minor quirks: oXygen does not recognise that &#131079; and &#131100; have width, so the line count is off by one if the characters stand alone on a line, and if they stand beside other characters, there is no way of splitting them up. This will hardly give rise to practical problems, since the identity of the characters is maintained, but there is room for improvement.

Mysteriously, JEdit is still as defective as before.

Jens

[Jens Østergaard Petersen]

I think those using Mac OS 10.5 with Java apps like oXygen will want
to skip the corresponding Java update for Mac OS 10.5, even though it
is very relevant security-wise.

It makes Ext. B characters unbreakable, but skews the position of the
insertion point (in some characters at least).

There are the same zero-width characters as on 10.6.

It makes some Ext. B characters invisible, if standing alone on a
line.

Jens

> > For answers to frequently-asked questions, visithttp://www.yale.edu/chinesemac