The final ‘ō’ in Rogō is an ‘o’ with a macron, which has numerical code 333 (ō for HTML) and HEX code 014D. This seems to cause some problems, as not all text editors are able to read/save the character, e.g. WinSCP’s internal editor, or are not, by default, set up with the correct encoding to read/save it, e.g. Eclipse. As a result, having edited files, we were finding that the titles of pages, for example, contained the ‘Å’ character instead.
We feel that it is perhaps unnecessary to use this special character, and it might be easier to just use a standard ‘o’ instead. However, in order to ensure the ‘ō’ is retained, it was necessary to take the following steps in the editors we use:
- Eclipse (which gives a warning when trying to save a file that contains characters in cannot encode) – go to Window > Preferences > General > Workspace and in the “Text file encoding” section, change the setting from the Default (Cp1252) to UTF-8.
- WinSCP – rather than changing the encoding settings of the internal editor (which doesn’t seem to be possible), I changed the editor that is used to Notepad++, which has many other advantages over the internal editor.
However, there was still a problem with any ‘ō’ contained within the database, e.g. the contents of the help files. Initially, the database would not let me store the ‘ō’ character. This was fixed by changing the Collation from latin_swedish_ci (which it must have defaulted to) to utf8_unicode_ci. The ‘ō’ character can then be saved in the database, but the browsers I have tested it on (IE9, Firefox, Chrome) display the ‘ō’ as a question mark (only for ‘ō’s read from the database though, not ‘static’ ones in HTML files). The only way to get this to render properly in the pages is to replace the character with the html code ō or ō. Therefore, we could go through the SQL files for the help pages (in the install folder) and do a find/replace on all of the ‘ō’ characters, then replace the contents of the help tables.
However, this all seems a bit unnecessary just to get ‘ō’ rather than ‘o’, so we have suggested the on the Rogo mail list that we could drop the ‘ō’ when using it in text, and just use ‘o’.