How to deal with strange characters, e.g. ©¼

[silvermoonbeam]

I've just begun to use Bookends and can see how it will really help my work, but I'm wrestling with a few problems: I've imported a number of references from Duke and have imported them into my database. Many of my references are for historic publications and the various accents they use are rendered with strange characters: e.g., ©¼ equals ü, ©· equals è, ©§ equals ç, ©© equals é, at least as far as I can tell.

Is there something I should do so these will show up correctly in my database? I've checked "Enable MARC filtering" in the Import Filter Manager window, but that didn't change anything. Furthermore, I'm a little confused about whether Bookends automatically knows which filter to apply or if one needs to do something other than check the filter's box in the Import Filter Manager window.

What can I do? At the least, is there a list of somewhere of what all these characters represent so I can change them manually if I have to?

I'm grateful for any help.

/christopher

[Jon]

Hi,

Please do not check "MARC filtering" unless you are really importing MARC records. If you aren't it will effectively disable the filter.

The strange characters you are seeing are Unicode-encoded characters being rendered as if they were ASCII. When you import you have to tell Bookends what the encoding of the characters is, in this case probably UTF-8. This is set in File -> Import Text Encoding.

Jon
Sonny Software

[silvermoonbeam]

Hi, Jon and thank you.

They were definitely MARC records, in fact, nothing gets imported if "MARC filtering" is left unchecked. I have now checked UTF-8 under Import Text Encoding but am still getting the strange characters. I'm not sure what to try next…

/christopher

[Jon]

What filter are you using? (BTW, this really isn't something for the forum, it's tech support, which should be sent directly to us at support@sonnysoftware.com).

Jon
Sonny Software