However, if I paste it first into Notepad and copy it again, it will display well in Scrivener.
Chinese text copied from Scrivener into PowerPoint does not have any issues. I have also tried copying from other programs, but the problem only appears when copying from PowerPoint.
Changing the font before copying does not solve the issue either.
I think you need to check the Chinese encoding in PowerPoint. Scrivener uses UTF-8; it looks to me like PowerPoint might be using GB2312 or GB18030, or another like Big5.
After doing some tests, I have concluded that the issue has to do with how PowerPoint encodes traditional Chinese characters. There is no issue at all when copying simplified characters from PowerPoint, and then pasting them into Scrivener. I do not encounter the problem when copying from Word, so it seems directly connected to PowerPoint.
I am not sure about the details, but since Traditional Chinese is historically mapped to Big5, it may be that PowerPoint uses this encoding, or perhaps GB2312 or GB18030, as the previous post suggests. I do not know how to test that.
However, I have not encountered the same problem with any other software on Windows, apart from Scrivener. Maybe Scrivener expects that non-alphabetic text is encoded as UTF-8, or another standard format.
If this is the issue, I would suggest that Scrivener implement compatibility with more encoding formats, as many other Windows applications do. Again, clipboard interoperability has never been an issue for me before. For different reasons, I often copy Chinese traditional text from PowerPoint slides, so that would make things much smoother for me.
Let me know if there are any other tests I can make to give more precise information about the issue.
Scrivener is not Windows-native, but is programmed in Qt6. It uses UTF8 as its encoding.
Literature & Latte is a small company with only 1 or 2 developers maintaining and developing all its Windows products.
For L&L to be able to convert the other Chinese encodings into UTF8 on copy and paste or import, will come down to whether Qt6 provides a library to do that.
What Word and Notepad (both the products of the megacorp Microsoft) or any other Windows-native programs can do is irrelevant.
Your best bet is to set up a macro to copy from PowerPoint into Notepad to do the conversion and then paste the result into Scrivener.
Mark
PS. If you can copy and paste from Scrivener into PowerPoint, that means PowerPoint can use UTF8. Is it not possible within PowerPoint to change the encoding of the slides. Note, I’m a Mac-user and I have neither Word, Notepad nor PowerPoint to try.
In case this is helpful to someone, this is the workaround I found. I installed a program called ClipboardFusion, and created a trigger to run a macro like this:
using System.Text;
public static class ClipboardFusionHelper
{
public static string ProcessText(string text)
{
// Convert text from Big5 encoding bytes to UTF-8 string
byte[] big5Bytes = Encoding.GetEncoding("big5").GetBytes(text);
string utf8Text = Encoding.UTF8.GetString(big5Bytes);
return utf8Text;
}
}
PowerPoint uses Big5 to encode traditional Chinese characters, and it does not seem possible within PowerPoint to change the encoding of the slides. This macro solves the problem.
Mark