Question Mark for Unrecognised Character - Mac

[epvb]

Hello all.

First off, if it's been asked before, please just point me to it and sorry for the disturbance.

Now ... The problem is this: I'm pasting text from another application into Explorer - (into a text field of a .swf). There are certain characters that it doesn't like. On Mac OS X it will replace the character with just a square. However, in OS 9 I get a cute little question mark character on a diamond shape inside a rounded square (if such a thing exists). I can handle that, that's cool.

What I really REALLY need to know is - what controls whether I can see that question mark character or not? A font installed on the Mac or ... ??? I can't figure it out.

See, this is being loaded up on another machine & it DOESN'T display the question mark character - in fact it skips the character alltogether. This is a Mac with the same OS, practically the same model, and the same copy of IE (5.1.7).

The character when pasted back into a plain text situation comes out like so - (Cap O with a hat, little o with a strikethrough, and an Omega).

Which would lead me to believe that it's not a font problem.

:confused:

Anybody?? Please Help!

[farafiro]

have u embeded the font??
if it didn't work, try putting this in the first frameSystem.useCodePage = true

[manuelarean]

Could you attach an image of the character?

For identification purposes
It sounds like a font question.....

[epvb]

Hi, sorry for the delay.

Haven't got back to Flash to check font embedding yet - but I have attached a jpg of the character.

Yeah, on closer thought it sounds like it has to be a font problem ... but I've gone through my installed fonts that contain these sorts of characters - only one actually (Webdings) & this char. isn't there that I can see. Anyway, I'll get back shortly ...

[epvb]

My bad.

[epvb]

Okay ... I checked out the embedding situation, and no, I hadn't set it to embed the fonts. When switched on, that character doesn't appear.

But the thing is ... I WANT it to appear. Need to know why it's not appearing on this other machine. Sigh, this is the story - I'm copying text out of QuarkXpress into this Flash app. - Quark creates some of it's own characters such as the smart quotes (think i've seen them in some other apps) - smart quotes are the ones that work out which side of a word they're on and then 'turn' the right way.

Basically, what's happening when I paste it in is something that should read [ "Read this" ] will come out as [ Xead thisX] - where the cap. X is the special character (above). So it kills the bad character, but also the character following it. - That's why I need to see these characters, so that I can easily find and correct the errors at input time. It's producing that same symbol (question mark thing) for a number of different Quark characters - anything Flash can't recognise.

:mad: It's one of those days.

Next guess is to either open the Quark file in another app. & see what happens or I'll have to export the text one story at a time ... maybe try to HTML or XML & see what I can pull out of it. - Big time waster.

Thanks for looking guys, I appreciate it.

[farafiro]

if it's a special character, why don't u look in here
www.unicode.net