On 30.04.2010, at 19:13, Kino wrote:
>
> On Apr 30, 2010, at 5:32 PM, Þorvarður Davíðsson wrote:
>
>> Can anyone explain what is the purpose of these special kind of
>> invalid characters?
>
> Use UnicodeChecker <http://earthlingsoft.net/UnicodeChecker/> to
> get information about them. However, they are just invalid
> characters in NWP.
As long as they are in a text document they won’t cause much trouble,
I think, although they influence the character count which can be
tricky and a serious matter for a (German) translator. -- Once I
exported ca. 1200 addresses from FileMaker Pro as a tab delimited
text file and tried to import them into Now Contact. I could only
import a few dozens each time because one of those invisible
characters persistently stopped the import each time. After I managed
to remove those pesky parasites I could import the whole text file in
one go.
>
>> I originally thought they came from the Windows platform, but now
>> I know it is also possible to create them on the Mac by
>> accidentally hitting a wrong key combination.
>
> I have never got such a character by a wrong key combination, at
> least in Cocoa apps, perhaps because I have assigned most, if not
> all, of easily combinable key combinations to some functions.
Not long ago I was in NWP and my fingers accidentally hit some keys,
though not longer than a fraction of a second, they sort of hit the
gab between two keys + modifier keys and that was enough to create
such an invalid character. Unfortunately I was unable to reproduce
the incident.
> Try <http://www.cocoabits.com/KeyBindingsEditor/> if you do the same.
Thank you very much this info, Kino.
>
> A possible source of those invalid characters, especially \x81, is
> imported MS Word files.
And another source are exported FileMaker Pro text files which
*always* have these characters embedded. FileMaker is available on
the Windows platform too, so maybe they use these invalid characters
in order to produce platform independent files.
Þorvarður
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