Monday, June 1, 2015

Changes to the Data-Export Tool

One of our users recently reported a problem with the way our data-export tool was handling special characters. Abstracts for his call often contain mathematical symbols, which were being displayed correctly on the ProposalSpace website, but were becoming garbled in the output file generated by the data-export tool. For example, Δ (delta) was showing up as Δ and ± (plus-minus) was showing up as ±.

We fixed the issue by changing the character encoding for the output file. Now, any character that is displayed correctly on the website is also displayed correctly in the output file.

(A special note: Some programs, like MS Word, might ask what encoding to use when opening the file. If that happens, select "Unicode" on Windows or "Unicode 6.3 (Little-Endian)" on Mac.)

Also, we've removed the "strip HTML" option from the data-export tool and made that the default action. If you miss having that option, just let us know and we'll be happy to put it back!

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