[softwarelist] Re: Strange behaviour of SRWE applet with OPW

David Pilling wrote:
In message <458DC752.1080402@xxxxxxxx>, Clive Bonsall <C.Bonsall@xxxxxxxx> writes
operations in OPW where the (invisible) FFFD character occurs in the middle of the string that you want to find.
FFFD is the Unicode which OPW uses to represent blank characters. In the standard RISC OS character set there are codes with no characters.
Hmmm? So, is this different from the blank character Unicode used by MSWORD? If you open up the Symbol dialogue in WORD, so that you can view the full Unicode character set, the blank character used by WORD seems to be the first character in the table (0020), whereas FFFD is the last character in the table.
When writing OPW it was interesting to see that many documents originating on RISC OS have invisible characters in, presumably the result of miskeying - anyway blank codes have to appear as blank, or else such documents will change appearance. 

So first guess is that odd codes are being replaced in the document.
This may be the source of SOME invisible characters in SOME of my documents. But I don't think there is any question that SRWE is inserting blank characters (FFFD) immediately before the string that is replaced --- they haven't come from RISCOS.
I expect that you can get rid of them by doing a global search/replace - if you can work out what the code value to search for is.
I have failed to find a way of doing this in OPW or MSWORD. Selecting the blank character (FFFD) in WORD and pasting it into the FIND box doesn't work ... it will actually find "ordinary" blank spaces (0020), but not the black diamond-with-white questionmark. However, global search/replace can be done if the DDL file is opened in Windows Notepad.
The other thing I notice is that when an FFFD blank character is present in a WORD document, it has an effect on line spacing --- extra space is present above the line with the FFFD character (equivalent to 6pt spacing). But there is no equivalent effect on line spacing in OPW. 


More later...


I'm intrigued.
--
C.B.

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