Re: GNU PSPP 0.6.2-pre6 now available

[Ben Pfaff]

Robert Westlund <address@hidden> writes:

> I create files containing UTF-8 characters on Linux, and pass them
> through pspp (also on Linux) to create .sav files for SPSS.  This
> process works beautifully on the Mac and Linux, where the characters
> display properly in psppire, but not under Windows XP or Vista in
> either psppire 0.6.1, 0.6.2, or SPSS 17.  It appears to be just a
> display issue based on the character encoding not being interpreted
> correctly, since copying and pasting the text from Windows into a
> UTF-8 encoded document displays the correct characters.  This happens
> when viewing the exact same .sav file produced by pspp 0.6.2-pre6.
> Note that typing Cyrillic characters into a cell works fine under
> windows, it's just the file that's the problem.  If it matters, I got
> the Windows binary from here:

International characters are difficult, especially in
cross-platform environments.  Recently John Darrington has been
enhancing the support for international characters in the PSPP
"master" branch, which will become PSPP 0.7.x (or 0.8.x? not
sure) when it is finally released.

I think that this issue is probably not going to be fixed on
0.6.x.  Sorry about that.  Maybe John can tell us for sure.

I don't know whether anyone has made test builds of PSPP 0.7.x
for Windows available.  If anyone has, please speak up.  (I think
that perhaps we should add pointers to 0.7.x test builds from the
PSPP webpage, since there seems to be a lot of interest in the
next version.)
-- 
"Sanity is not statistical."
--George Orwell