TRYING TO POST A TIP HERE

[plugsnpixels]

I'VE SPENT 15 MINUTES TRYING TO GET A POST THROUGH HERE WITHOUT ERRORS...

It's about re-colorizing an image with PS neural filters and accidentally removing moire, when I was just trying to do the recoloring. Previously I had failed to purposely remove the moire with ACR's Detail slider. Nice surprise.

[dgberg]

Are you paid up?

[plugsnpixels]

Pay to play? Last I knew that applied only to For Sale but yes, I'm good.

It's the technical issue we've been facing forever, not a blanket block on me posting.

[Jeremy Roussak]

Explain to me, please, exactly what you did and exactly what responses you received.

Jeremy

[plugsnpixels]

Hi Jeremy, I had typed exactly this:

"I found a scan of an old postcard on ebay of a building I am familiar with, but it had some nasty diagonal moire. Not sure if this was in the original postcard or a result of the seller's scan, but it was annoying and ACR's Detail>Remove Moire did nothing to it.

So I gave up and decided to try desaturating the image back to what would have been the original greyscale tones in 1906 and recoloring it with PS's Neural Filters. That worked well AND removed the moire!"

(As I posted the above I was expecting the usual error again but it didn't happen, so that's interesting!)

To get past the error I previously removed the ">" and "!" characters.

[Simon J.A. Simpson]

I have given up trying to post here since experiencing multiple unexplainable failures. Writing to the site administrators produces nothing but silence and no change.

Vainly hoping this post might work.

[plugsnpixels]

I have given up trying to post here since experiencing multiple unexplainable failures. Writing to the site administrators produces nothing but silence and no change.

Vainly hoping this post might work.

It did!

[digitaldog]

I have given up trying to post here since experiencing multiple unexplainable failures. Writing to the site administrators produces nothing but silence and no change.

Vainly hoping this post might work.

The forum has been super buggy for more than a year. It has something to do with certain characters. It's a new bug; this was never an issue. And yes, we are promised it will get fixed, but as yet, the bugs still exist. The only real fix for me was to use TextSoap on Mac to remove whatever odd characters this forum barfs on.
But I shouldn't have to jump through these hoops.

[Jeremy Roussak]

Interesting. I just tried to post exactly what you had typed; it worked, without error.

I'll investigate.

Jeremy

[Slobodan Blagojevic]

Jeremy,

I tried posting a welcome message on your 1001 thread in the Coffee Corner, using iPhone, and got this:

(posting the same via a desktop worked just fine)

[francois]

Jeremy,

I tried posting a welcome message on your 1001 thread in the Coffee Corner, using iPhone, and got this:

(posting the same via a desktop worked just fine)

Maybe it' just an ellipsis ( "..."). As noted many times above, "special" characters or invisible make posting impossible. Andrew uses TextSoap (if I'm correct) before posting to clean up text. This is a very frustrating issue as posting a simple answer can take a lot of time.

I have no real definition of special characters but anything outside a to z and 0 to 9 may be special!

[Jeremy Roussak]

OK. I've just tried to post, from both phone and desktop, and I too get an error when I use a character with a diacritical mark or an ellipsis. It may be that there are other characters which cause problems.

I'll investigate. My role is admin rather than tech support but I'll see what I can do.

Jeremy

[Slobodan Blagojevic]

Maybe it' just an ellipsis ( "..."). As noted many times above, "special" characters or invisible make posting impossible. Andrew uses TextSoap (if I'm correct) before posting to clean up text. This is a very frustrating issue as posting a simple answer can take a lot of time.

I have no real definition of special characters but anything outside a to z and 0 to 9 may be special!

Perhaps... but what special characters are there in my original post?

[Jeremy Roussak]

Perhaps... but what special characters are there in my original post?

It's hard to be certain from a screenshot, but you may well have an ellipsis after "and". It may have been inserted automatically: on a Mac, three dots are generally auto-converted to an ellipsis.

Jeremy

[Chris Kern]

I'll investigate. My role is admin rather than tech support but I'll see what I can do.

The problem appears to be that the forum software is not "8-bit clean."  It is possible to encode English text with only seven bits of data (128 variations), but other languages that use a Latin alphabet require character codes that are eight bits wide (256 variations) to accommodate character-diacritic glyphs and other so-called "special characters."  (These, of course, are only "special" if the text is confined to English.)  There is an international standard for these alphabets that all modern software should adhere to.  As Andrew Rodney points out earlier in this thread, the forum software accommodated standard 8-bit characters until someone started mucking with it.  If whoever is currently responsible for maintaining the software can locating an archived version of it and compare it with the revision that is running now, that would be a good starting point for isolating the cause of the problem.

Addendum

In the event it isn't clear why it is important to use the standard international character-encoding scheme for Latin-based languages in a forum that is predominantly in English: (1) some place names relevant to forum posts may require diacritics; (2) anyone posting in English from a modern computing device (one manufactured in, say, the last 25 years) is likely to be typing eight-bit character codes.

[Jeremy Roussak]

That may well be part of the issue. The forum software is open-source. We are investigating.

If you are, like me, a bit of a computer nerd and would like to be hugely entertained, watch this lecture by Dylan Beattie. Somehow, he manages to talk, very amusingly, for an hour on the subject of "plain text".

Jeremy

[Chris Kern]

If you are, like me, a bit of a computer nerd and would like to be hugely entertained, watch this lecture by Dylan Beattie. Somehow, he manages to talk, very amusingly, for an hour on the subject of "plain text".

Brilliant and, as you suggest, quite entertaining for those of us of a geekish disposition.  Thanks for posting the link.  Beattie's talk was also a real trip down memory lane for me.

I have a lot of experience with the issues of typing and rendering multiple languages on computing platforms.  Hace muchos a[n with tilde]os, I worked closely on one such project with Joe Becker, one of the principal developers of Unicode, the universal scheme for encoding all the world's languages.

[Chris Kern]

Attached is the diagnostic error message the forum software popped up following my initial attempt to post the previous message because I typed the Spanish word for "year," which requires an "n" with a tilde.  Res ipsa loquitur.

[Daverich]

Attached is the diagnostic error message the forum software popped up following my initial attempt to post the previous message because I typed the Spanish word for "year," which requires an "n" with a tilde.  Res ipsa loquitur.

I haven’t been able to reply to a post on this forum for more than a year so I thought I’d give it a try and see if the problem is fixed. Hitting the post button to see if this goes.

[Daverich]

I haven’t been able to reply to a post on this forum for more than a year so I thought I’d give it a try and see if the problem is fixed. Hitting the post button to see if this goes.

Wow, look at that. It made it!!! Finally.