Exporting Japanese footnotes to RTF

[Maria]

del

[KB]

Today I exported a translation with Japanese text and footnotes to RTF (use export formatting not checked). The text came out fine, but the footnotes showed question marks instead of Chinese and Japanese characters. Mellel doesn’t show any readable text but it never does, the text was OK in Nisus Express, AbiWord and NeoOfficeJ. But all three applications showed the question marks.

Export to RTFD and to HTML works fine, footnotes come out lovely (though as endnotes, but that is OK), so it might be a Scrivener problem.

The problem here is that RTF is a 7-bit format, and internally it has to do a lot of stuff to represent these characters. In the footnotes and annotations in Scrivener, Scrivener has to try to insert all of this stuff directly into the RTF stream. Because it has to do this using ASCII, a lot of international letters can get lost (anything not supported by ASCII). To try to get around this, I have tried changing my alterations to the RTF stream to use UTF8. Apparently RTF does support unicode escape sequences, so this should solve the problem, we’ll see. It may cause issues when you try to open an RTF file using these characters in a program that doesn’t support Unicode, but that is unlikely on a Mac. If this change causes any major issues, however, then I will have to revert to using ASCII… So, just wait and let’s see how this all works in beta 3.

Little glitch in RTFD and HTML:
I set the group titles to be exported as well, and this happens in boldface. The footnotes numbers are not bold, but the first number is boldface like the group title above. Then starts the style for footnotes.

Uh… Probably. Footnote numbers just get inserted as-is, so will take on the formatting of the last character. You just have to be aware of this and set up your files accordingly.

Thanks,
Keith