Tech Info 109: XPress 7.3 save issue into folder names with umlauts

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HELIOS Tech Info #109

Mon, 24 Sep 2007

XPress 7.3 save issue into folder names with umlauts 

We received customer reports about a strange issue after a “Save As…” to an AFP Server volume using Quark XPress 7.3, if the target folder contains umlauts (other non-ASCII characters may have the same issue). XPress creates a new folder with a mangled (corrupt ???) name and a damaged file in it.

For example:

In the AFP volume “HELIOS Demo” is a directory “Täst” which contains an Xpress file. Its path is “HELIOS Demo/Täst/Project1”.
Open the project and save it to a new file “Project2” in the same folder.
As a result there is a new directory “Tst” (which does in fact contain invisible characters) next to the original “Täst” directory.
From UNIX, the directory “Täst” looks like:
# ls -lv
drwxrwsrwx   6 tom  helios    204 Sep 11 13:32 Täst/
# ls -lb
drwxrwsrwx   6 tom  helios    204 Sep 11 13:32 Ta314210st/
Where “a314210” is the UTF-8 representation of the decomposite “ä”.
From UNIX, the directory “Tst” looks like: 
# ls -lv
drwxrwsrwx   4 tom  helios    136 Sep 11 13:53 Tst/
# ls -lb
drwxrwsrwx   4 tom  helios    136 Sep 11 13:53 T302212st/
Where "302212" is the mangled MacRoman char in UTF8.
A network trace shows that Quark Xpress 7.3 works on the server using a wrong encoded name. In our test it used a MacRoman encoded directory name “Täst” which is not allowed in a Unicode / UTF-8 context.
EtherShare does still create the folder as requested by the client because such binary names are supported.
In our test, the resulting file in the original directory (“Project2” in directory “Täst”) was OK and the other file in directory “Tst”was damaged. We have not been able to reproduce this problem when the volume name also contains an umlaut (e.g. “HELIOS Dämo” instead of “HELIOS Demo”.
Until this problem is resolved by Quark we recommend either not to update to Xpress 7.3 (version 7.2 does not have this problem) or not to use umlauts for folder names where XPress files are stored.