Re: [NTLK] Crying for help: Lotus Organizer vs Russian encodings

From: Anton Balaban (anton_at_balaban.ru)
Date: Thu Dec 12 2002 - 12:43:43 EST


On Wednesday, Dec 11, 2002, at 17:21 Europe/Moscow, Kuritex
<kuritex_at_mail.i.com.ua> wrote:

> Just faced a certain problem beacuse of my own carelessness. Got a
> MP130 well-lined with numerous notes in Russian, connected it to PS's
> COM-port, loaded subsequently Newton Connection utility plus Lotus
> Organizer as well - and started playig with NCU's 'Synchronize' button
> afterwards. Actually, this was generally a screen-gazing at running
> NCU (selected Sync option in the NCU's GUI, selected Lotus Organizer
> file format, ran synchronization...), so as soon as I felt got an
> eyeful loading bar picture, I powered off PC with Newt and just fell
> asleep after that. This morning, however, I discovered that the entire
> Russian content in the Newt' Notepad turned to awful solid asterisk
> lines!.. For now, I'm looking for efficient solution for such a
> probled (I just want to get all my Russian notes displayed properly!)
> - but see no way how to do this.

Leonid,

I'm afraid that you are out of luck and will never see your notes again
unless you have a fresh backup of your newt. Sorry. "Russification" of
MP 120-130 makes Newton OS to store all Russian letters in Unicode.
Which is good from conceptual point of view, but very bad in a real
world because NCU does not handle Unicode, it just truncates "extra" 8
bits of information upon transferring to and from desktop. MP 120-130
sold in Russia were bundled with special Russian version of X-port,
which handled all encoding conversions when communicating with desktop.
I tried to ask author of X-port to release that special version of
X-port as unsupported freeware (since it's essential piece of software
for Russian Newton users and it has Russian GUI, so it won't be of any
use for anyone not speaking that language) but got no reply. For now
all I can do is advise you to *always* make full backup before any
synchronisation, at least that's what I'm doing and it saved my data a
couple of times.
By the way, this NCU's handling of Unicode is another great excuse to
get a MP 2x00 Newton - Russification for NOS 2.1 stores all Cyrillic
letters in 8-bit MacCyrillic encoding and it's MUCH easier to exchange
data with the desktop, especially with a Mac. But at least you have
less chances to loose your data, worst thing that can happen is wrong
8-bit encoding which is easily fixed on any desktop platform or Newton.

Anton Balaban

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