Long history here, because I can’t quite figure out when the weirdness entered into the process:
I wrote about 60 K of novel (call it 0.5th draft) on my iPad, importing it into my PC’s Scrivener at various times via Dropbox. Roughly the first half was in a number of different little file chunks (mostly a scene or a day’s work), while the second half was in two larger files. After I’d gotten it all imported, I did various bits of reorganization, and divided it into a number of scenes, some of which were the same as the original files, and a bunch (second half of original work) not.
Then, in the interests of keeping things a bit more organized and sync-able between the two machines, and with more relevant titles to boot, I did a fresh export into a new folder which I then transferred to Dropbox, and then went to my iPad, synced up, and discovered that the new files corresponding to the first half of my work all showed up in a Japanese font.
How did I get here? And how can I recover from this?
This could also be a little/big endian problem with UTF-16, so the UTF-8 check is a good one. There are several ways to “announce” a file’s encoding in UTF-16, and if a program has not been configured to handle both, it can cause the result to look like an eastern script because all of the letter codes are pointing to the wrong spot in the font table.
I’m in the US–the closest I’ve been to Japan is various Japantowns on the West Coast
It looks as though it was a UTC-16 vs UTC-8 thing – setting it to UTC-8 made it work. Mille grazie! I suspected it was probably somebody’s encoding conflict, but wasn’t quite sure where to start poking.
