[OLAC-credits] Trouble with accents

[Kelley McGrath]

Hi Lizzie,

Like Alex, I have been copying and pasting. Does that work for you?

I am not a Mac person and am not sure what TextEdit is, but it sounds like something that lets you insert characters that aren't on the regular keyboard. If so, this is what I think is happening (bearing in mind that my knowledge is fuzzy and I could be wrong). The computer is not matching what you see, but the underlying character encoding. There is more than one way to encode what is presented to you on screen as the same character. Traditionally, characters in MARC records were supposed to come from the MARC-8 character set. At some point, MARC was was modified so that Unicode could be used instead. (couple links: http://ac.bslw.com/community/blog/2009/08/marc8-and-utf8-what-does-it-mean/, http://www.loc.gov/marc/specifications/speccharintro.html ). I suspect what is happening is that the underlying encoding of the character that came out of MARC is not the same as the underlying encoding that TextEdit uses. I'm not sure how to get around that other than copy and paste.

Diacritics are a big headache for anyone who works with MARC. You may have noticed that we have some that are still not working right--it looks like there should be a diacritic in the credit, but instead there's some sort of extra garbage character.

Kelley
________________________________
From: olac-credits-bounces at lists.uoregon.edu [olac-credits-bounces at lists.uoregon.edu] on behalf of Kyrios, Alex (akyrios at uidaho.edu) [akyrios at uidaho.edu]
Sent: Friday, December 20, 2013 4:09 PM
To: olac-credits at lists.uoregon.edu
Subject: Re: [OLAC-credits] Trouble with accents

I’ve been copying and pasting from the credits themselves (yes, I can see the characters you included there). I haven’t had any problems with that approach.

Alex Kyrios
Metadata and Catalog Librarian
University of Idaho
208-885-2513
akyrios at uidaho.edu


From: olac-credits-bounces at lists.uoregon.edu [mailto:olac-credits-bounces at lists.uoregon.edu] On Behalf Of Elizabeth P. Figueroa
Sent: Friday, December 20, 2013 3:45 PM
To: olac-credits at lists.uoregon.edu
Subject: [OLAC-credits] Trouble with accents

Hi,

I'm mainly translating credits in Portuguese, and I've run into the same problem several times now. When I need to enter a character with an accent, I've been copying them in from TextEdit (I'm working on a Mac). The most common are ç, ã, õ, and á (can you all read those, I wonder?). But the annotator website doesn't seem to recognize those as the same characters in the credit, even thought they look identical. I get error messages when I try to submit, which tell me that the terms must be entered exactly as they appear in the credit. This is irritating on my end, and will also create more work for others, since each flagged annotation must be manually reviewed.

Is there any way to avoid this problem? How are other annotators entering diacritical marks? Thanks for your help.

-Lizzie Figueroa
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