Oxygen XML Forum

Working with Early Modern texts in English, there are a few non-ascii characters which are perfectly normal for us, but which trigger the annoying "Special Characters Detected" warning message. This message is highly confusing for novice users, because they don't think there's anything "special" about any of their Unicode characters, and they know they're not using Asian languages or bidi text.

You can click on "Do not show the dialog again", but this has to be done at the global level by each user; I'd like to be able to turn it off at the project level using the .xpr file, so that I can avoid having to explain to every new batch of encoders that the message is misleading.

Would this be possible?

Incidentally, what is "special" about Asian languages or early modern ligatures or any other Unicode character? I can see that bidi will of course be a challenge for the text editor, but not regular Unicode characters, surely?

Cheers,
Martin

Sorry, ignore this -- I was confused by the inability to turn off the warning message on the project level; I see I can turn on the special character support and therefore presumably the warning won't appear.

Hi Martin,

The Text editing mode in Oxygen is not a component we've built from the grounds up. The component is a standard Java editing text area that we've tuned for XML editing. When this component encounters certain characters in it (characters which may be bidirectional characters or characters which are special combining chars) it enables certain functions which might make typing and opening larger documents (documents over 50-100KB) quite slow for you. So this is why we show that warning. If you choose to open the document with this special functionality disable, those characters may not be rendered 100% properly in the content.
I guess that you could take the Oxygen Preferences->Editor / Open/Save page and pass it to project level for your students. Before this you can experiment and check if having this feature enabled or disabled would be the right thing to do for your content.
The topic from our user's manual which deals with this issue is this one:

https://www.oxygenxml.com/doc/versions/ ... pport.html

The visual Author editing mode, because if was built by us from the ground up does not have such problems with any set of characters.

Regards,
Radu