MODLY NOTE: merging this with a related thread. NAPPA's answer also explains why pen names shouldn't include apostrophes, quote marks and other reserved characters.
~gal-texter / Pen Jun2008

It's hardly a disaster, more a big, but still vaguely irritating none the less:

When uploading story chapters, I've found that the apostrophe in chapter/fic titles morph into a \ and eat up the rest of the title... Is it simply that it's not apostrophe-friendly or is it a glitch in the system?

The programming language we use - had apostrophes, and quotes as reserves words. We're trying to work around this issue.

Oh... I see... Glad you're aware.

Thank you for the prompt response. Will henceforth work my titles around that. Not great tragedy, or any tragedy for that matter. (Though you might want to include a little note by the uploading form so that authors are aware of that. Just prevents confusion...)

Improper mapping of non-standard characters


This is of fairly recent vintage. When I first started posting on PK, characters such as section symbols, pound signs (UK money) and accented letters mapped excellently with no problems. For about the last month or so, anything using such non-standard characters has produced gibberish. For example the charmonium sign in physics < Ω > showed up as < Ω > in my latest chapter. I hate to see what several paragraphs of French look like in my Chapter 26.

What's the deal with this problem? Is there anything you can do about it? Is there anything I can do about it (other than stop using all non-standard characters that is).

This is a character encoding problem. Once I put your piece into UTF-8 the omega displays properly. This probably has to do with how they import the submitted stories (especially since their pages are listed as using ISO-8859-1).

Are submitting a doc file? Because if you are then you are just going to have to wait until the admin's update the headers to UTF-8 or put in an a/n to let the readers know to change it.

If you are submitting it as raw html then you are either going to have to use the equivalent code in ISO-8859 (for things like the § sign) or just going to have to wait (if your character is not defined 8859, like omega).


On a side note, I can't believe that you are talking about charmonium in an HP fanfic. If I had known I would have been seeing some quantum mechanics I would have read you fic earlier but now you have sparked my interest.

I'm using straight Word (.doc) - no HTML. I'm happy to wait until a fix is made. Any ETA on that fix?

Technically I was referencing Ω+++, but the plus signs came through OK. I've used lots of physics in my story - the "fifth element" itself is a matter of standard (not quantum) physics. There's an explanation of Apparition in one of the earlier chapters that involves quantum superposition. Hermione makes a joke about Schrodinger's cat at another point.

There's other science too. One of the Healers is head of Charmonium Mediated Transitory Epigenetics (problematic transfigurations) at St. Mungos.

I'm working on a chapter now that's got a lot of straight astronomy in it.

Hi Bexis,

As Big_fish noted, the character encoding was not right to display the characters that you were after.

I've changed the encoding to UTF-8. From what I can tell that has stopped the problem from occuring. If any more problems do pop up or I've missed something, do let me know.

It appears our recent server move - of about a month ago - has probably contributed to the jibberish appearing as we upgrade and reinstall software and don't quite get the settings right. Thank you for bringing this to our attention!

Keep up the brilliant writing!
James

That seems to have fixed my problem. I checked a number of chapters and all of them seem to be OK now without my having to reload them or anything.

Thank you very much.

I did notice a similar problem, however, in the most recent chapter (54) of Vox Corporatis. The quotation marks in that chapter are appearing as question marks.

This has only been recently happening, but suddenly many stories are suddenly formatting incorrectly. It seems that the stories are in Western (ISO-8859-1) but the page is set to UTF-8 in the HTML. I have to force Firefox to change the characterset to Western on each page to show properly.

This is causing it:



Can't set to character set to UTF8 if the actual pages aren't UTF8... If stories are being uploaded in a mixture of charactersets, it would be better to remove forcing the character set (ie remove that line). Most web browsers are able to auto-detect the characterset of pages.

It's a bit annoying.

It looks like they noticed the problem too, seeing as how chapter 54 has been taken down. Looks like the chapters there are in ISO-8859-1, not unicode. Woops!

yup, the change was made because whatever they are using to convert .doc to html converted it in unicode, causing symbols to be off. The problem is that most stories uploaded in html are in ISO-8859-1. I am sure they will come up with a solution soon.

We've reverted back to ISO-8859-1 due to other problems poping up, but we're working on a change that should be completed within the next hour or two that will allow authors to chose the charset for each story, and we'll hopefully auto-detect which charset is the best option.

Does this mean that I have to do something else?

We are in the process of adding functionality that will allow stories to automatically be given the charset that they were uploaded in. All chapters that you have currently uploaded are in the correct charset now and all characters appear to be displaying correctly.

Thank you for your patience. If any other problems come up do let me know

I just checked some chapters and a lot of it's fixed. The French passages in ch 26 are back to normal, as are most of the section symbols that I looked at. But I uploaded some corrections to chapters 10 and 11 last night (I edit past chapters a lot when people bring typos to my attention, and when I need to tweek the story), and those chapters seem broken again. One of the Arabic book titles in ch 11 is particularly a mess.

Is there an extra step I have to go through when uploading revisions to existing chapters?

The two chapters you uploaded this morning, along with any additional chapters that you upload from now on, should all display correctly.

You actually beat me to it by uploading those chapters before I had time to apply a code change which essentially means that any DOC files uploaded will now use the UTF-8 encoding, while HTML-uploaded chapters will remain under the ISO-8859 format.

Sorry that you got caught up in the confusion but if things are running the way they're supposed to it should all be sorted now

edit: Just thought I'd add that when you upload a chapter the "preview" of the chapter may not appear correct. This is because the preview will display in ISO-8859 regardless of whether uploaded by DOC or HTML. Rest assured that regardless of how the preview appears, if the file is uploaded in DOC format it will display in the correct encoding when displaying on the portkey website.

Sometime within the next week I hope to have reworked the preview page so that it will correctly display the chapter exactly as it will appear on the website.

This appears fixed this morning. Thank you.

The character mapping is causing problems again. It's not as bad as before, but characters such as © and è are showing up as empty boxes in the chapter I just posted. I post using Word documents that include characters found in the standard Word library of symbols.

Will let the coders know; though I have no idea whether that's something that could be easily fixed or not. I'm pretty sure you don't mind this issue much, but you wanted to let us know in case it could be fixed.

Sorry we haven't replied here sooner. Lately, I can stay in PK only for 5 - 15 minutes at a time, which I normally spend handling other matters. Same with my mod teammates.