Max7 doesn't like French? - special characters display

Transpose to mi or whatever note without accent :))) Seriously, also would like to know...

i had this bug since max 5 (or is it 6 ?)
i'm on macosx 10.6.8
it may be orse on my machine too, because with each time i resave and re-open ; the strange caracters replicated themselves which is quite weird
with time i just dropped the accents altogether.

Please post a representative patcher. Thanks! Jeremy

The problem won't be limited to French, but will almost certainly affect all diacritical markings, non-Latin alphabets, and everything else beyond the old 7-bit ASCII coding.

As I recall, up through Max 4 the MacOS extended character set was used, when Windows support came around then its extended character set was also used, and (again, IMS) Max automatically switched between the two without anyone noticing. I think with Max 5 we had the move to Unicode encoding, but then there's the question of which Unicode (there are about a half-dozen variants).

None of that helps you. However, if both your old [send ré] and [receive ré] have both been converted to [send r√©] and [receive r√©] and the actual send-receive pairs still communicate, the problem is basically a cosmetic one, isn't it? You'd obviously prefer to see "ré" but if the patch is at least working, then that would be some consolation.

You could probably batch-edit the JSON code in the patcher files as an alternative way to sort this out.

@Peter Castine : on my system it's a little more than cosmetic, beccause (maybe you'll see it in the above example) the displaying gets messier each time i re-open my patch. Or maybe it's each time i re-save it ?
It is quite inconsistant though, and sometimes it just displays everything alright, maybe my only affected patches are pre-max6, or pre-"native text rendering" box unchecked (or was it checked ?...).

thanks Peter and Vichug
yes the thing is it's totally inconsistent, sometimes characters are √©, or é, or something else, and sometimes they're fine.
I've also noticed that it tends to happen in old patches that were created in Max 4.
I'll do further testings and I'll post a patch/bug report.
thanks

Max is supposed to use UTF-8 (with Unicode Normalization Form C) internally. So that question is answered. But apparently there are some places where that's not being properly enforced. Thanks for bringing it to our attention, we'll take a look.

Jeremy

Your patch only contains comment objects with the issue. Does it occur with others? Also, please provide a patcher without 3rd party objects and the minimum required to demonstrate the problem, this is a lot of mess to dig through in order to see a problem with the comment object.

Thanks, I appreciate it! Jeremy

For instance, I can't reproduce with this patcher

Can you? How? Maybe we'll need instructions on how to create these bad comments. I am assuming that you are on OSX, but please provide your platform info, as well.

Thank you - Jeremy