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Unicode and Mac OS X (10.4.8)

Posted: Fri Dec 29, 2006 9:58 am
by Superman859
Does anyone know if Unicode (utf 8) has problems working properly with Mac OS X?

I was under the impression that unicode was standard and should work across all platforms. However, one of my testers has Mac OS X and cannot view all text correctly. The text is written in Korean using utf 8. He can only see some of the text. utf 8 structures Korean by syllables, each syllable having it's own access code. It seems that some of the codes to access the character don't work for him, or the character simply doesn't exist on his computer for some reason.

Some syllables show up, such as the basic ones. However, other syllables will not show up correctly, even though they are in the unicode character set. I believe he has trouble viewing the characters that are not used in the language, or at least not commonly used. Basically there are some syllables made up of different 'letters' that wouldn't really go together, and that is where the problem seems to be.

I'm guessing he can see the basic Korean characters, but not all the 'extra' ones included in the unicode set that are there for expansion/etc. It's also not just my site, I had him check a few others and the characters don't show up on those sites either.

Any ideas?

Posted: Fri Dec 29, 2006 10:13 am
by feyd
Content-type issue? Byte Order Marker issue?

http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/international/

Posted: Fri Dec 29, 2006 1:16 pm
by Chris Corbyn
Where do you mean? In the terminal window?

I think it's just down to the terminal settings.

Posted: Fri Dec 29, 2006 2:53 pm
by Kieran Huggins
I believe you can choose not to install Asian languages in OS X, as it saves nearly a GB of space. He should be able to add it from the OS X DVD now.

Posted: Fri Dec 29, 2006 6:52 pm
by Chris Corbyn
Kieran Huggins wrote:I believe you can choose not to install Asian languages in OS X, as it saves nearly a GB of space. He should be able to add it from the OS X DVD now.
You need a 3rd party app called monolingual (I think) for that (uninstalling languages). Still need to get around to trying that, although removing Garage Band cut me about 2GB free.

Posted: Sat Dec 30, 2006 3:20 pm
by Superman859
I don't think it's simply whether or not he has Asian languages installed. This is because some of Korean DOES show up on his computer. It's only certain syllables / character combinations that do not show up (character meaning combinations of Korean letters).

A Screenshot of something he can see

The above is a link to a screenshot he took. It is of a webpage that shows various Korean characters with their respective unicode data above the image. He should be seeing Korean in every square (I did), but instead he only sees it in some...

Original Page

Any ideas why this might be? For those of you with Mac, do all characters show up correctly for you, or is it the same result he gets?

Posted: Sat Dec 30, 2006 4:04 pm
by Kieran Huggins
I totally missed that - sorry!

You could try alternate encodings.. though it seems that UTF-8 should work. Make sure the data was encoded to UTF-8 properly with mb_convert_encoding() prior to database storage, and also make sure your headers and meta tags also re-enforce this encoding.

I can email you a section of a book I have that talks in great length about character encodings if you wish - PM me your address if you're interested.