SMF Support > SMF 2.0.x Support

Typographical Bullets

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MrPhil:
Admin > Features and Options > Configuration > Languages should tell you what languages are available and what the default is. As far as whether a language is UTF-8, probably the easiest way is to switch your personal account (not the entire system) to that language, and see either the output HTML's meta tags or the browser View > Character Encoding.

When you say you cut and paste text with a bullet, what program is the source of that text? What is its encoding? If it's a Microsoft product, it's likely CP-1252. Depending on the browser, a page in Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) may display it correctly (actually displaying CP-1252), and a page in UTF-8 might even display correctly (overriding UTF-8's upper control codes) but usually won't. x95 is the "Message Waiting" control code in UTF-8.

If this is a character that you're going to be using a lot, consider writing a BBCode entry for it: [bullet]

--- Code: ---array(
'tag' => 'bullet',
'type' => 'closed',
'content' => '& #8226;',      <--- close up the gap
),
--- End code ---

When you say that & bull; is working in posts, is that without [html]? Both posts and signatures should normally work the same way, so it's a bit puzzling. Is the & being converted to &amp; in one but not the other? Anyway, a BBCode might be the easiest, but anyway you will still need to edit whatever you paste in as a bullet character to [bullet]. Otherwise, pasting a CP-1252 bullet character into text to be displayed as Latin-1 or UTF-8 will be risky. If you know both the source and destination encodings match, it should be OK. That's the only reason that I can think of your other forum working.

If your forum is currently Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1), you might change the encoding to CP-1252 (most browsers recognize it). That way it will definitely come out as a bullet, without any manual editing.

stormiecub:
Okay, well it's getting more puzzling, so I have to say that I really appreciate your attention to this. I'm going to try to give as much detail as I have, hopefully without leaving anything out, and I'm going to be bolding the parts that I think are particularly important or interesting.

To answer your question, the bullets are being copied out of my browser, sometimes even from the forum itself when they are displaying. I've done the copying out of FireFox, which is obviously not a Microsoft product unless Microsoft bought Mozilla while I was sleeping.

[*]I am currently running two forums with the same version of smf installed. I have not done anything to modify the language files on either forum so far. One displays the typographical bullets, and the other does not.
[*]The new forum is ISO-8859-1
[*]The old forum is UTF-8 *
[/list]

So right now the UTF-8 is displaying correctly but the ISO-8859-1 is not. There is no variance by browser either. Firefox, Chrome, Opera, all the same effect. And I never installed any other languages onto the old forum either, so I'm confused as to why it has a lot of extra language files that seem to be superfluous. Were these installed when I manually upgraded the software several months ago?

If I want to write the custom BBCode, where do I have to put it? I'm not accustomed to editing the files very much.

* Why the difference of I didn't modify anything?

stormiecub:
I put in the custom bbcode to make this work, and it's just as easy as being able to copy and paste in the bullet itself. I would leave it at that, except that the language files are confusing me so I might as well learn something new.

MrPhil:
You're not trying to cut and paste between the Latin-1 and UTF-8 forums, are you? Those would have different values for the bullet, if it is displayed as a hard coded binary character of one or two bytes. If you're cutting and pasting the "finished display" text, it will be a hard coded binary, not an HTML entity. I just cut and pasted the bullet from your second post into a DOS (Windows) file, and it came over as x95, which tells me that the origin of this bullet was from a CP-1252 encoded page, probably Word. It's probably been transferred from place to place by cutting and pasting, without the byte value changing. Anyway, what's in your second post is a "Smart Quotes" bullet, which is displayed correctly in Firefox even though it's technically an invalid character for UTF-8.

Did you install via Fantastico? They have a habit of installing every language package available to SMF. There must be some difference in the installation and maintenance history of the two forums, if one is Latin-1 (the default)_and the other is UTF-8.

If you want to create a [bullet] BBCode that inserts an HTML entity & #8226;, you can just paste in the code I gave to Sources/Subs.php, in the function parse_bbc. You'll see a long list of tag definitions that look similar (look for 'tag' => 'br', if you're not sure, and put it after that section array(...),).

stormiecub:
I installed both versions of the forum through Fantastico. The older one has all the language files installed and the new one only has the Latin character set.

With the BBCode installed it's working, so I think I'm going to leave it at that, since I'm having huge problems with using the coded bullets. Every time I save the page it outputs the bullet instead of the code, meaning that I can't effectively edit the signatures that I need to edit. The BBCode (which I finally did figure out intuitively) works just fine, even if it is more characters. Simple fix, all things considered.

I appreciate your patience with me. Code is not my strong point and I tend to feel a bit feeble minded when I come here and become instantly confused by all of the code talk. You've been wonderful and I very much appreciate the help!

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