Recently in Software and Unicode Category

I'm updating my FileMaker Unicode database database to reflect the changes in the recent versions of Unicode. As part of the database, I like to have the decimal version of the code point handy as well as the actual hexadecimal version (it's good for debugging purposes).

Now the default version does not appear to have to hex to decimal conversion built in (not even in FileMaker 10), so here's my (updated) solution.

1. In the main table corresponding to the list of code points, I created a field for the Hexadecimal Unicode code point value. I'll call this HexValue for now. It must be a Text field. You can create a Decimal field (Calculated), but you won't be able to fill in the formula yet.
2. Then I created a second table to store the correspondence between a hex digit (0-F) and its decimal value (0-15). The HexValuefield is Text, but the DecValue field is a Number. See the sample table below (some values skipped).

   HexValue (Text)	DecValue (Number)
   0	0
   1	1
   2	2
   3	3
   4...9 (1 row each)	4...9
   A	10
   B	11
   C...E (1 row each)	12...14
   F	15

3. To do all the conversions, you need to extract the text value of each position in the code point. So, I created fields corresponding to the value for each place in the hex code point as shown in the list below. I'll explain the formulas below.

   Note: In case you're wondering, the name of the places are semi-inspired by Roman numerals and algebra.

   • Rightmost digit Units (n) : nhex = Right(HexValue;1)
   • Penultimate digit (t) : thex = Left(Right(UnicodeHex;2);1)
   • Antepenultimate digit (c) : chex = Left(Right(UnicodeHex;3);1)
   • 4th from right (m): mhex =Left(Right(UnicodeHex;4);1)
   • 5th from right (d): dhex =If(Length (UnicodeHex)>4;Left(Right(UnicodeHex;5);1);"0")
   • 6th from right (x): xhex = If(Length (UnicodeHex)>5;Left(Right(UnicodeHex;6);1);"0")

   The challenge for modern Unicode is that code points now come in variable lengths (4-6), so if you count from the left you can't always know you are the appropriate digit. That means you have to count from the right, but there's no simple formula for picking the 2nd digit from the right. My solution is to take a rightmost chunk then count in from the left. So to get the 3rd hex digit from the left, I take the right most 3 digits, then find the leftmost digit in that chunk (hence the embedded left(right) formulas).

   I also have to check to see if the length is greater than 4. When the length is 4, some digits are filled in with the value 0, otherwise you do a string extraction. Hence the formulas for dhex and xhex use conditional logic. Hopefully though, if Unicode adds more digits, these formulas will continue to work (unlike my original attempt which only assumed 4 digits in the code point.

4. To convert each extracted digit to its decimal version. I need to set up some Relationships between tables so that each extracted digit can look up the decimal equivalent. For each of the intermediate digit fields above, I created a link to an instance of the Hexadecimal Lookup table (there are 4 instances total). It's important to make sure each instance has a name you can remember later; mine mention which digit I am working on. See the Relationships diagram below.
   
5. Now we can finally get that decimal value! If you haven't already, create a DecimalValue field and make it Calculated.
6. Here's my calculation. I'll explain what the parts mean below
   HexLookup N::DecValue + 16*HexLookup T::DecValue + 16^2* HexLookup C::DecValue + 16^3*HexLookup M::DecValue + 16^4*HexLookup D::DecValue+16^5*HexLookup X::DecValue
   • "HexLookupN::DecValue" means give me the equivalent decimal value column based on the hex value in the "HexLookupN" (units digit) table instance.
   • "HexLookup T::DecValue" does a look up for the tens unit. I multiply the value by 16 an add it to the ones value. Remember the hex #FF (F=15) means 15*16+15
   • I look up the hundreds place decimal value and multiply it by 16^2 (256), then the thousands place decimal and multiply it by 16^3 (4096).
   • I add up the results of each converted decimal digits times its appropriate power of 16.The calculation is complete.

I was wondering what to write next when an accessibility test presented a perfect example of how you can be fluent in one Web standard, but goof up on another standard (Oy!).

I wanted to test Movable Type in the nifty Web AIM Wave accessibility checker. One feature of this tool is that it will show you the location of header tags (e.g. H1,H2,H3), which can be handy to know if you are testing a Web page for markup and don't feel like plowing through a sea of HTML tags.

By chance I chose an entry about You-Tube videos in Latin which talked about Latin versions of Star Wars (Bella Stellārum) which include the scene in Empire Strikes Back (Imperium Contra Offendit) where Luke learns that Darth Vader may be his father and screams "Nōōōō...n" in utter horror.

Original Blog Entry (Screen Capture)

Tragically though, when WAVE rendered this page for me, I got the less dramatic "NMMMM...n". Apparently WAVE doesn't understand Unicode too well.

 

As Seen on WAVE

It looks like accessibilty and Unicode together present another trap for the unwary Web worker, but then again you can always show your superior knowledge in one standard or the other - depending on your audience. In the war of the standards, it can be very comforting.

When you create a Web page with Unicode characters, it is recommended that you include the following character meta tag:

<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
...
</head>

And if it's XHTML, you need to include a final "/" at the end.

The idea behind this tag is to force the other broswer into the correct view and prevent the display of Roman character gibberish. Sometimes though, you can place a properly formatted UTF-8 Web page (meta tag and all) and still see gibberish.

In this case the problem is not you, but the Web server, typically configured with Apache. If it's an American server, Apache is probably set up to ONLY deliver ISO-8859-1 encoding and, even though your file has the UTF-8 data in it, the server is trying to deliver it as Latin 1 (hence the Latin 1 gibberish).

There are three possible solutions available when this happens

Talk to Your Server Admin

And when you do, you can politely suggest changing the httpd.conf file as documented on Seapine Software. You can also comment that most modern Web apps are set to serve UTF-8 data including CMS programs such as Plone, Movable Type and Drupal. Others such as Facebook and Twitter support UTF-8 natively.

I believe this is what a Web service having this issue did recently.

Use an .htaccess file to just configure specific directories and pages

If you're comfortable enough to mess around with changing your directory preferences you can try this suggestion from Ted Texin about using AddType statements

The main proviso here is that an .htaccess file can do some serious damage unless you are careful. It's possible that you may not be able to upload one into your directory because of this, but it could be a good solution to suggest to a server admin if only your directory is affected and the rest of the site has to be encoded differently.

Unicode Escape Codes

If neither of the above solutions is available, then you can deliver the content within any encoding...if you encode the "exotic" characters as Unicode numeric escape codes.

For example if your site is Latin 1, but you need to present Russian content you can change your code from

Русский

to

Русский

As you can imagine, this IS an absolute last resort solution. If you ever need to transfer content between systems, you will have many more problems with escape codes (none of which are supported in true XML or Microsoft Word). Not to mention the difficulty of replacing each character with it's Unicode numeric equivalent. Escape codes were really only meant for short passages of text.

But...if this is where you are, then you can try either the old Mozilla Composer which converted anything you typed into escape codes or maybe you can try another utility. Truthfully it is extremely difficult problem to do convert raw UTF-8 text to HTML entitiy codes these days.

So I emphasize that this a rare problem and should be easily corrected by your server admin...and if it's a personal Web site, you may want to think about alternative providers.

Or you could try the ultimate last resort - attack of the angry Unicode expert.

Post Script (Apr 3, 2009)

A student in a recent seminar pointed out a site which does convert a character to a decimal code reference at http://www-atm.physics.ox.ac.uk/user/iwi/charmap.html (from Alan Iwi at the Rutherford Lab at Oxford). Just enter or paste the character and click the the Make HTML button to see a decimal entity code. You can enter an entire string of characters.

I'm currently preparing a seminar on Unicode and I was struck by how far Unicode implementation, especially in terms of raw Unicode text, has come in the past 4 years. Some of the warnings I used to present in 2000 or even in 2004 seem almost quaint now.

For instance when Mac OS X first came out, the older applications were not set up to take advantage of the Mac Unicode utilities, such as the U.S. Extended keyboards. I used to have to specify which applications could work with Unicode and which couldn't do it. But yesterday I realized that I couldn't find any old applications on my machine that didn't work correctly. What a difference that makes.

The same is true on the Windows side. If you get the latest version of most applications, the chances are that Unicode support is there - even for raw text editors.

Similarly, I recall when many HTML editors converted any non-English character to an numeric HTML entity, but now most applications are set to work with real UTF-8 text embeded in HTML tags. This is much easier to edit and crucial for being able to transfer data between the Web and other XML resources.

Russian, Chinese and Greek data are being treated as just "text" and not as a special case that programmers need to agonize over. There are still plenty of issues to be worked out, but it's good to appreciate progress when it's made.

Richard Ishida has a Web based Unicode look up tool at
http://people.w3.org/rishida/scripts/uniview/uniview.php

This is a search form which allows you to view data by name, hex value, actual pasted character or range.

There's another conversion utility at
http://people.w3.org/rishida/scripts/uniview/conversion.php
which allows you to convert characters from hex values to different variants such as decimal values, percent escapes (Web address) and UTF-8 vs. UTF-16.

The character paste feature is especially valuable for random symbols such as ∞ (infinity) or ɛ (Open e, epsilon vowel). You can finally extract a code point from a weird symbol used in your Word doc.

When I'm doing an initial test to see if a product is Unicode friendly or not, I typically switch to my IPA keyboard and see if it will accept and display phonetic character input. Why this test?

The first reason is that I actually know my phonetic symbols and can type something pretty quickly. They're also a fairly straightforward Western type alphabet so there are minimal font display issues.

The second is that while developers may program specific support for East Asian, Cyrillic or Middle Eastern languages, they rarely build in IPA phonetic symbol support (unless the product is targeted towards linguists). So, if the product can handle phonetics, it's a very good sign that generalized Unicode support has been implemented.

Does it mean every script is equally supported? Probably not. The gotchas are usually RTL languages like Arabic and Hebrew and the dead scripts like Gothic and Linear B. But if you have IPA support, you probably also have basic support for Czech, Welsh, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian and maybe Armenian and Georgian. That does cover a lot of territory believe it or not.

The concept of time zones isn't exactly a Unicode issue, but it does relate to issues of globalization.

This blog entry from 4 Guys from Rolla explains the advantages of storing times/dates in UTC format vs. local time. The first one mentioned is that if your servers switch time zones, your data will still be the same.

Quick UTC Primer

UTC time zones are defined in terms of the Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), from the 0° longitude line estabilshed at Great Britain's Royal Observatory, Greenwich.

If you live in London, then you live in the UTC or GMT. If you live Paris, which is one time zone to the east, then you live in UTC +1 (or one hour later than London). If you live in Philadelphia (Eastern Time Zone), then you live in UTC -5 (i.e. five hours behind London).

The idea of using UTC is to flatten time zones and place everyone in the GMT (London) time zone, but then add information about how many hours to add or subtract in order to convert to local time. If you have operations in multiple time zones, looking at the UTC time can help you determine the sequence of events much better than local time alone.

About Daylight Savings

Interestingly, even though most countries (except Japan) implements daylight savings in the summer, UTC does not. Right now (Aug, 2007) London is UTC +1 (1 hour ahead), but in the fall it will return to UTC 0.

For the Eastern Time zone inhabitants, the summer time zone is UTC -4, and will return to UTC -5 in November.

That means right now, my EDT time of 2:35 PM converts to 6:35 PM UTC (or 18:35 UTC in military time).

References

NASA - http://science.nasa.gov/Realtime/Rocket_Sci/clocks/time-gmt.html
Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry - http://www.fhs.ch/en/worldclock.php

The good news is that Moveable Type renders text with the UTF-8 encoding by default. The bad news is that the fonts in the theme choices need some tweaking.

First, let me say I used the Movalog’s Movable Type Style Generator utility which is an excellent place to start ...but yes I did have to do some manual edits in the CSS file.

The default blog font these days is Trebuchet MS which is attractive, but doesn’t include my favorite Unicode characters (like phonetic symbols). Another choice in the Themes is “Lucida Grande” which does include the right characters...but only on the Mac.

So what I did was:

1) Within the Style Generator, I selected Lucida Grande as the font choice
2) I downloaded the .css file onto my desktop
3) Within the .css file, I made sure the styles (except the banner) were set to
font-family: ‘Lucida Grande’, ‘Arial Unicode MS’, sans-serif

This pushes Windows viewers into their Unicode font, Arial Unicode MS. If you want to be really fancy, you can add other fonts like TITUS Unicode, but that’s another experiment.

4) In my blog settings, I clicked “Templates” then the link for “Stylesheet”
5) I cut and pasted the CSS code.
6) I rebuilt the Moveable Type site and so far so good.

I’m just glad Movable Type is flexible enough to let me fix the fonts as I need.