Characters that Notepad cannot display???

  • Thread starter Thread starter Bruce W.1
  • Start date Start date
B

Bruce W.1

I'm stumped. Here's my quandry.

Gmail displays horizontal rules <hr> inserted by other mail clients like
Outlook Express into email messages, though it does not enable <hr>
insertions by Gmail users.

A <hr> can however be copied from and back into a message within Gmail.

Whatsmore, this <hr> once copied from Gmail can also be pasted into MS
Word. This means that the <hr> is stored on the Windows Clipboard.

Here's the mystery. When pasted into Notepad (or other text editors) it
displays nothing but whitespace. How can this be? Are there characters
(in this case representing a <hr>) which Notepad cannot display? MS
Word can display it as a horizontal line or rule.

What is the mystery data on the clipboard and how can I see its coding?

Thanks for your help.
 
Bruce W.1 said:
I'm stumped. Here's my quandry.

Gmail displays horizontal rules <hr> inserted by other mail clients like
Outlook Express into email messages, though it does not enable <hr>
insertions by Gmail users.

A <hr> can however be copied from and back into a message within Gmail.

Whatsmore, this <hr> once copied from Gmail can also be pasted into MS
Word. This means that the <hr> is stored on the Windows Clipboard.

Here's the mystery. When pasted into Notepad (or other text editors) it
displays nothing but whitespace. How can this be? Are there characters
(in this case representing a <hr>) which Notepad cannot display? MS Word
can display it as a horizontal line or rule.

What is the mystery data on the clipboard and how can I see its coding?

Thanks for your help.
Click to expand...

You can examine the binary codes in any file with a binary viewer/editor,
e.g. with xvi32.exe (http://www.chmaas.handshake.de). To avoid getting lost
in the code, do this:
1. Paste your magic characters into an emtpy Word document.
2. Put some markers, e.g. ***, in front and after them.
3. Save and close the file.
4. Open it with your binary viewer/editor.
5. Find the markers.
What are the ASCII numbers for the magic characters in the center panel?
 
Bruce said:
Gmail displays horizontal rules <hr> inserted by other mail clients like
Outlook Express into email messages, though it does not enable <hr>
insertions by Gmail users.
displays nothing but whitespace. How can this be? Are there characters
(in this case representing a <hr>) which Notepad cannot display?
Click to expand...

The issue is not so much whether Notepad can display the characters, as
whether the default font in Notepad contains the necessary glyphs to
display the character.

MS Word, as a full-featured word-processing application, has special
smarts to display horizontal rules, em rules and other exotica, even
when the font is set to Arial or Calibri.

In Unicode, the em rule is U+2014. Most Windows fonts support Unicode;
but they don't contain the full 65,536 glyphs, to prevent the font files
becoming huge. If you set the default font in Notepad to be one of the
fonts which contains the full Unicode character set, the em rules will
display correctly.

(Those fonts usually have "Unicode" in their name; eg Lucida sans
Unicode, or Arial Unicode).

Applications which use legacy (outdated) character sets like ASCII or
ANSI, obviously will have problems with chars from an extended character
set. But Notepad is fully Unicode-capable (in fact Notepad.exe is
basically just a window around the Windows text edit control).

Hope it helps,

Andrew
 
Back
Top