Singularity on the Plane

What blogging tool can work with the Japanese hiragana character あ (’a') properly? Let’s test all programs listed on http://codex.wordpress.org/Weblog_Client.This post is meant to raise awareness of the dismay Unicode support in today’s blogging programs.

First of all, the test system is Windows 98. This is the OS used by computers in Student Internet Center (SIC), and SIC is my gateway into the internet. Unicode works completely fine in Firefox, IE, and Notepad++ here. It’s OK if the program requires Java because it is installed on this computer. It’s fine if the program requires .NET 1.1 because installing .NET 1.1 don’t take much time. Program that requires .NET 2.0 is unacceptable because installing it takes ages on this slow computer (it compiles many files to native code using ngen.exe). Mono 1.1.17 can’t be used as the replacement of .NET 2.0 because Mono can only be installed on NT machines.

These are the programs that aren’t reviewed due to the aforementioned restrictions:

• BlogWriter 1.0.29 (Zoundry): Couldn’t start on Windows 98 (ZBLOGWRITER caused an exception 10H in module PYTHON23.DLL).
• ecto 2.1: Needs .NET 2.0.
• Elicit 1.1.7: Needs .NET 2.0
• Windows Live Writer Beta: Won’t run on Windows 98 (I’ve already installed .NET 1.1 (does it need 2.0?). It pinvokes a nonexisting function in Windows 98’s kernel32.dll)
• JBlogEditor: Crashes before even posting.

Now on to those who could run. Some programs mercilessly converts あ to ‘?’. This happens everywhere: in the main and/or code editor and the title text box. Those programs are:

• BlogDesk 2.6
• w.bloggar 4.00 (as a bonus, it will crash when exiting)
• Semagic 1.5.9.7 (btw the version I downloaded (for Windows 98) can only be used for livejournal)

Some programs work better:

• BlogJet 1.6.2.60: あ is displayed fine in the main editor. It is displayed as a square in the code editor. It turns into a question mark (?) when the post is sent to WordPress. あ is converted into ‘?’ in the title text box.
• Post2Blog 1.23.3: あ is displayed fine in the main editor. It will be converted into squares when you enter the code editor. However, no character corruption occurs when the post is uploaded (just remember to not enter the code editor). あ is converted into ‘?’ in the title text box.
• WB Editor 2.5.1: Same imperfection like Post2Blog. Weird for a .NET program. Doesn’t .NET use UTF-8 internally?
• Qumana 3.0.0: あ is displayed as a square in this program. However posting it to Wordpress works.

Two programs are perfect, which means that the program displays あ correctly in the title text box, main editor, and code editor, and uploads the post with no character corruption. Here are the winners:

• Flock 0.7.4.1 (a Firefox-based browser with integrated blogging support, among others)
• Performancing 1.3 (a Firefox extension)

There you go… Most of the blogging clients I reviewed failed. We really live in a primitive age of computing where software developers don’t care about supporting Unicode…

PS: I won’t use Flock nor Performancing. Performancing regards newlines in the code editor as real lines so my post will contain extra lines unless I do some unnatural deleting. Flock messes the <pre> (or <PRE>) tag by converting the starting tag into <pRE> and the ending tag into </PRE>, destroying all newlines in the process (already reported those bugs btw). I’m currently using Qumana to post this blog entry. The Japanese characters that show up as squares is tolerable because I edit the HTML file from my home.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 12th, 2006 at 12:24 pm by Agro Rachmatullah and is filed under Hardware & Software, Japanese, Works. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.