Greek capital letter 'Α punctuated does not appear correctly

cchalkiopoulos

Hi Notepad++ team.

Thanks for your great efforts to implement this powerful text editor.

I have come up with the below bug/misbehavior and sharing it with you fyi.

The Greek capital letter ‘Α’ does not appear correctly with notepad++ when it is punctuated e.g. 'Α
At the same time it appears correctly with default windows notepad application.

Here you will find an example that I created https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/88941561/gr.srt

Feel free to ask any questions.
Regards,
Christos Chalkiopoulos

guy038

Hello cchalkiopoulos,

I’m almost sure it’s a problem of the current font used, in Notepad++. But I’m a bit surprised, because I’ve got, personally, lot of fonts, on my system, which can correctly display the Greek Capital Letter Alpha : Α ( \x{0391} ), as well as the Greek Capital Letter Alpha with Tonos Ά ( \x{0386} ) :

Andale Mono, Consolas, Courrier New, Lucida Console, Source Code Pro, … for monospaced fonts
Arial, Century Gothic, Comic Sans MS, Garamond, Microsoft Sans Serif, Tahoma, Times New Roman, … for Proportional fonts

So, which is your current font ?

Click on the Menu option Settings - Style Configurator…
On the left, choose the language Global Styles and the style Default Style
Then, look at the Font Name, in the Font Style section

You can also give us the name of the font, used by Microsoft Notepad, as well : just click on the menu option Format - Font… !

As for me, after a copy-paste action of your example, in a new tab of my N++ v6.8.1, the capital alpha letter, at beginning of line #2, is correctly displayed, without any initial accent and can be searched, in regular expression mode, with the syntax \x{0391}

Remarks :

All the Greek standard characters, between 0370 and 03FF, can be found at the address below :

http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0370.pdf

And the Greek Extended characters, between 1F00 and 1FFF, from the link below :

http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1F00.pdf

With an appropriate font, most of the Unicode characters, in these two PDF files, above, should be displayed, if the encoding of your file is NOT the ANSI encoding !

If your file is encoded in ANSI, you probably use the Microsoft Windows-1253 encoding table, between 00 and FF, which can be seen, at the address below :

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/goglobal/cc305146

Just notice that the character Greek Capital Letter Alpha with Tonos Ά ( \x{0386} ) is not included in the Windows-1253 encoding.

Best Regards,

guy038

cchalkiopoulos

@guy038 Hi guy thanks for your response. Did you actually try to open the file ‘gr.srt’ from my previous post? Does it open correctly in your Notepad++?

I am uploading a screenshot that shows the problems (note the red arrows at line 1 and line 3) and the Fonts.

The Fonts by the way are:
notepad++ : Courier New
notepad: Consolas

The screenshot link is here https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/88941561/notepad%2B%2B%20vs%20notepad.JPG

Also, copy (from notepad) and paste into notepad++ works fine.
The problem occurs when I open the file with notepad++.

My notepad++ version is 6.8.3 / Windows 10.

Let me know any comments.

Best Regards,
Christos

guy038

Hi, cchalkiopoulos,

First of all, I really sorry not being able to reply you, before, but, all this week, I was very busy, at work, and just needed to spend good nights ( I mean… more than 6 hours per day ! )

A small point : Unlike I said , in my previous post, the character Greek Capital Letter Alpha with Tonos Ά ( \x{0386} ) does belong to the Windows-1253 encoding, with code \xA2 !

Secondly, to be exact, when I clicked on your link, below,

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/88941561/gr.srt

to get your gr.srt file, in my Firefox browser, v41.0.2, your text is displayed, exactly like the one you get, wrongly, when you open in Notepad++. That is to say, the text below :

’λλαξα αλλάζω αλλ’ζω
Αλλαγή
’λλος
Ένεση

Luckily, when I chose, afterwards, in Firefox, the text encoding Display - Encoding Text - Greek (Windows) ( instead of Greek (ISO) ), the text was, now, rightly changed as below :

Άλλαξα αλλάζω αλλΆζω
Αλλαγή
Άλλος
Ένεση

And after a Copy-Paste, in Notepad++, I got this same right text, in Notepad++ !

Note : I didn’t write the text, in reverse video mode, because the Ά character is wrongly displayed as an Α !

I also tried, with my IE8 browser, and, after changing, in IE8, to Display - Encoding - Greek (Windows), I got the same right text, too :-)

If you prefer, you may, either, send me a quick e-mail, with your gr.srt file, as an attached file, at the address :

Cheers,

guy038

guy038

Hello, cchalkiopoulos,

Thanks for your e-mail. So I got your two files gr-1.srt and gr-2.srt. Once opened in N++, I, first, needed to change the encoding of the gr-2.srt file to ISO 8859-7, because the initial default ANSI encoding wasn’t a Greek encoding, due to my French configuration, of course !

And I immediately noticed that the Ά character was replaced by a small square symbol. Then I opened the gr-2.srt file in an hexadecimal editor, and I found out that the corresponding code was \xA2. Right ! And, if you open, in N++, the Character Panel list ( Edit - Character Panel ), you’ll easily verify, that the glyph of the \xA2 character is, exactly, a square symbol !

To that purpose, see the Windows table, for the ISO 8859-7 encoding, called Windows 28597, below :

https://msdn.microsoft.com/fr-fr/goglobal/cc305173.aspx

Under the table, we learn, from the list, that the exact character, represented, is the MODIFIER LETTER APOSTROPHE, of Unicode code-point \x{02BC}. Now, the default Courier New, used by N++, does NOT have a glyph for that character => the square displaying. But, some fonts, as Lucida Sans Unicode, Segoe UI, Source Code Pro, correctly, displays this kind of apostrophe ! ( Just note that the Character Panel seems still written, in Courrier New ! )

May be, you’re wondering : What’s the relation, between this character and the GREEK CAPITAL LETTER ALPHA WITH TONOS of Unicode code-point \x{0386} which should be displayed, instead ?

Well, If we examine the other Greek encoding, named Windows-1253 ( which is, probably, the default ANSI encoding on your Greek configuration ! ), at the address below :

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/goglobal/cc305146

it easy to point out that the GREEK CAPITAL LETTER ALPHA WITH TONOS, of Unicode code-point \x{0386}, is, indeed, located at the value \xA2 of the Windows-1253 table ! Moving back to the Windows-28597 table, you’ll notice that the Ά letter, is part of this encoding, but with the code \xB6.

Moreover, comparing the Greek characters in the range [\xA0-\xFF], in these two tables, they ALL have the SAME location, _except for the Ά letter, which have two locations : at \xB6 for the Windows-28597 table and at \xA2 for the Windows-1253 table.

Therefore, to my mind, two solutions are possible :

You change the encoding, of the gr-2.srt file, to the Windows-1253 one, also handled by N++. Don’t forget that N++ does NOT change the file contents, when you change the current encoding for an other one. Notepad++ just re-interpret the codes, mostly between \x80 and \xFF, according to the new encoding used !
You keep the ISO 8859-7 encoding, for your gr-2.srt file, but you need to perform a full search/replacement, in Regular expression mode, changing any character MODIFIER LETTER APOSTROPHE, of UNICODE code-point \x{02BC} into the GREEK CAPITAL LETTER ALPHA WITH TONOS, of Unicode code-point \x{0386}

So, SEARCH = \x{02BC} and REPLACE = \x{0386}

On my French configuration, I wasn’t NOT able to simplify this S/R to :

SEARCH = \xA2 and REPLACE = \xB6 ( refer the Windows-28597 encoding )

May be, this simplified S/R should be enough on your Greek machine. But the previous S/R, with true Unicode values, will work, in all cases ! Do remember the definition of Unicode :

UNICODE provides an UNIQUE number for every character :

No matter what the platform
No matter what the program
No matter what the language

Best Regards,

guy038

P.S. :

There’s an improved 2003 version of the ISO 8859-7, given in Wikipedia, at the address, below :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO-8859-7

Three characters were added in that version :

at location \xA4, the EURO sign \x{20AC}
at location \xA5, the DRACHMA sign \x{20AF}
at location \xAA, the GREEK YPOGEGRAMMENI ( or iota subscript ) \x{037A}

If you want to find out all current and old characters used, all over the world, just click on the link below, and download the PDF file, named CodeCharts.pdf. This big file, of 97,8 Mo, contains the description of the 120737 characters, of the last Unicode v8.0 version, that came out, on June 2015 !

http://www.unicode.org/Public/UCD/latest/charts/

Of course, ALL these characters could be written, in an N++ UTF-8 file, but, very likely, most of them wouldn’t be displayed, with their exact glyphs, because your current font does NOT allow their representations. And, generally speaking, I don’t think that a font, built for displaying ALL Unicode characters, exists, anyway ! It would be waste of time, indeed !

cchalkiopoulos

That is a very detailed answer. For sure you have covered all angles of this issue.

Your 2 suggestions make sense to me and I have actually tried the 1st one and it works fine for me to change the encoding to Greek/Windows-1253.

From my side it is totally fine to mark this thread as being resolved.
I’m however very curious to the fact that you do not consider this as a bug on Notepad++.
I will try to phrase this as follows: “A certain file is displayed correctly with Notepad but with Notepadd++”. Isn’t this fixable?

Many thanks for your time.
Honest regards,
Christos C.

Goten San

@cchalkiopoulos said in Greek capital letter 'Α punctuated does not appear correctly:

That is a very detailed answer. For sure you have covered all angles of this issue.

Your 2 suggestions make sense to me and I have actually tried the 1st one and it works fine for me to change the encoding to Greek/Windows-1253.

From my side it is totally fine to mark this thread as being resolved.
I’m however very curious to the fact that you do not consider this as a bug on Notepad++.
I will try to phrase this as follows: “A certain file is displayed correctly with Notepad but with Notepadd++”. Isn’t this fixable?

Many thanks for your time.
Honest regards,
Christos C.

Thanks.