Slackware's KWrite does not save IPA characters
 

Hello,

Newbie is asking a question:
I am trying Slackware with the KDE desktop environment. The editor KWrite does not save some of the so-called IPA characters as found on this page
http://www.wordreference.com/fr/Fren...unciation.aspx

For example, the character "a" with the tilde sign above it is not saved.
The editor displays it well but when I press the save button, it protests that it may not be able to save it, and it doesn't.


Before, I used to employ gedit (in Debian). That editor worked fine with the exotic characters.

How can I make KWrite save the characters?

Thanks in advance for your help

Use the command "locale" and see what the output is. I get "LANG=en_GB.utf8" If you don't have the "utf8" bit, you need to set the locate correctly.

When I enter the command "locale", I don't get exactly the line "LANG=en_GB.utf8". Here is all that I get:

bash-4.2$ locale
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE=C
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=


Are they acceptable?

Another thing that I should have mentioned is that emacs (on the same sytem) is successful at both displaying and saving the IPA characters. I wonder if my question is about the editor or about the x system or about something else.

It looks as if Kwrite is the problem. I'm not a KDE fan, so I'm not familiar with it. Perhaps you could switch to Kate?

Based on your response, I consider this thread as solved. It is now safe for me to say that the problem is with KWRite, and that KWrite perhaps requires a plugin to be able to save the exotic characters. Thanks again.

@david: kate and kwrite use the same editor kpart, so switching probably wont help.

@parviz: it sounds more like the default encoding (utf-8) that kwrite uses doesn't support IPA characters.
Look under tools/encoding for the right one. I would first try utf-16.

Cheers

I tested KWrite with encoding utf-16. With that encoding, KWrite is able to save the IPA characters, but then other complications develop. For example, KWrite did not work properly under the xfce desktop environment. If I select utf-8, then KWrite works under the xfce the same way it does under kde.

Sorry. I made a mistake. KWrite is able to operate very well under xfce, and it does save IPA characters when encoding utf-16 is selected. Thank you so much!

Both encodings of Unicode support all characters. But UTF-16 is chiefly used in Windows applications, while UTF-8 is the norm for Unix, e-mail systems, and many programming languages. There may be problems using UTF-16 in Linux.