Cantr II Discussion Forum

Not sure if this is due to the encoding, or something else.

Whenever I copy a note, I just get a blank note in my inventory.

This has happened to me also. But not for all notes, which I find odd. I thought it had to do with non-editability, but even notes I know to be editable have had this happen.

ASCII notes cannot be copied. You need to change the encoding to UTF-8.

Doug R. wrote:ASCII notes cannot be copied. You need to change the encoding to UTF-8.

Would it be possible to add this somewhere on the note page? I'm sadly not smart enough to work this out on my own and I doubt I'm the only one.

If someone puts it in pretty readable words, I'll add it to the page and request translations.

Would it be possible to disable the button if the note is not in UTF-8? Or check in the copying stage if the UTF-8 values are empty and give an error message if they are.

Notes in ASCII format cannot be copied. If you are getting blank copies, convert the note to UTF-8 format by viewing the note and using the format conversion link in the upper right hand corner. If the note truncates after conversion, convert back to ASCII, then convert to a different encoding that does not truncate the text. The note should then be copyable.

How's this?

SekoETC wrote:Would it be possible to disable the button if the note is not in UTF-8? Or check in the copying stage if the UTF-8 values are empty and give an error message if they are.

There's lots of other formats besides UTF-8. While I'm sure you could remove the copy button from ASCII notes, it seems to be not worth it for what is ultimately a transitory problem (eventually, all ASCII notes will be converted, since new ones are not being made).

It's not just ASCII notes that can't be copied, it's everything that's not in UTF-8.

I think anything can be saved in UTF-8, but I noticed that if a note is already in UTF-8 and you try another encoding, you can't get the text back anymore. Of course people shouldn't do that but I tried it anyway. Although this time I tried it with a copy note made especially for that purpose. Earlier I noticed it accidentally with a Polish dictionary, when I converted it from UTF-8 to something else. It made special characters all wrong and when I switched back to UTF-8, they were still wrong, so I had to replace them manually, and what made it more difficult is that two different characters could be replaced by the same wrong character, so I just had to replace with the letter that's more common and then check with google translate if it made sense, if not then try another letter until the words matched their translations. This time converting from UTF-8 to something made the whole note blank, and after that it remained blank no matter what I switched into. Also selecting unknown encoding from the menu gives an error at the top of the page. So yeah, I guess it's not supposed to be used that way. I was just testing.

It's not just ASCII notes that can't be copied, it's everything that's not in UTF-8.

This was not true before the downtime. If it's true now, it's a bug...

but I noticed that if a note is already in UTF-8 and you try another encoding, you can't get the text back anymore.

This was also not true before the downtime.

This is a serious problem. Some notes, like the Black Atlas, truncate when converted. If they can't be moved back to ASCII text anymore because of some change made, that's a problem.

Wait, ASCII is what now? I always thought it was just numbers and symbols forming a picture or whatever, but a map note (with pictures--like, an actual image, not one made out of numbers and symbols. Dammit you know what I mean! ) I just picked up did this. How to tell if it's ASCII?

If you click on the change encoding link and the dropdown menu says ASCII then it's ASCII. It just means normal text that doesn't support special characters. New notes are automatically saved in utf-8 so the problem is only with notes that were made before the change.

ASCII stands for America Standard Communications or something. It's just like 126 symbols or maybe 255 I dunno.

American Standard Code for Information Interchange, and it's a 7 bit (128 character) system. It has since been extended to 8 bits (256 characters).

*brain melt* Okay, I'm just going to deal with the notes disappearing then. You're confusing my brain.