Those of you who were bored by yesterday's meticulous (some would say tedious) account of my adventures
in Japanese character handling might want to give today's column a pass. On the other hand, those of you
who enjoy watching people eat crow might want to stay tuned. I assume these people like to look at the
aftermath of traffic accidents, too - no matter.
My brilliant decision to double the program's backslash in all cases turned out to be horribly, horribly wrong. I sent the program over to Huntsville, Alabama to be tested by the people who first discovered the problem. Just the idea that people in Alabama are working on Japanese language software is fairly amusing in itself, I think. Anyway, it failed with flying colors, to mix metaphors.
So it is back to the drawing board. Literally - I had to draw that big red lightning bolt cutting through the kanji character, after all - you don't think that just happened by itself, do you?
My next fix is in the works, but this all seems to be the universe's way of keeping me from getting a big head. Or should that be a bigger head? (Those who know me have already seen that the universe is giving me a bigger forehead, though.) Either way, I consider myself properly chastised. The proper way to fix this problem might be to double the backslash for Western text, but not for Japanese text. Figuring out which is which will be the difficult part.
But, as I always say, "That's why they call it work."
You can respond to my ranting here.
Don't count your rants before they've hatched.