In reply to prophacyks (msg # 25):

A fix was found that would resolve your issue with the character descriptions link to a message in this forum

In reply to iromanah (msg # 24):

Yeah problem is I'm on a tablet, I don't have windows or Mac nor any text programs on it.

I have found that in order to fix this, I have had to replace quotes ("), single quote/apostrophes ('), dashes (-) and any accented letters. As Skald said in msg# 7 above: "...if you replace them using the standard keys on the keyboard the affected description/sheet should display correctly."

It does take careful screening to find the incompatible characters/punctuation on the longer description pages. There was one that I had to read through four times before I found that an accented letter e was the final culprit. My description pages are displaying correctly as I replace the characters mentioned.

Several of my descriptions are blank. I'm not going to do anything unless requested by the Moderators.

Just had one of my players report this problem, as well...

And his character description hasn't changed in...oh...over a year, maybe longer, I think (I don't remember exactly when he joined the game.)  I'll ask him if he recently made any changes, and send him a link to this thread, but I've already rMailed the mods about it, as well.

Something that may be related: I copied my game introduction for my latest game from a word document and the intro isn't displaying correctly.

I haven't changed the character's description in that game since, I believe, August 2011.

In reply to Shannara (msg # 8):

Hey, I'm gonna tell you the ', " issue is not the problem.. I have multiple characters that use  ', and "..all through their descriptions .. and some are displaying just fine.. but I have several character description and character details that WILL NOT display.  If it were a ', " issue ...would it not be consistent across the board?!?

Please help!

Did the same thing.. NO DICE!

I tried THIS too! No Dice!

It is the issue, even if the ' and the " looks the same, they are not.  ANY punctuation is suspect, as I found a sheet yesterday that ',' and '.' had to be redone before it would show up in the character description.  Things like the ^TM symbol, bullet points (the little circle), etc. also cause issues.

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There are these choices at the moment if a character description is not showing:

1) Wait until jase has time to look at the issue (timeframe unknown)

2) Create a thread in game and post the character descriptions there until there is a fix available

3) Retype the sheets  -- either in part, or replacing all the special characters, and using only your keyboard, not copy and paste.  If you can find a text editor that will remove the formatting, that may work as well.

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If your description is large, you can do what I did to test the issue yesterday:

Copy and paste the sheet elsewhere.

Copy back just one small section of it in the character description.  Save.  See if it shows up.  If it does not, replace the special characters and punctuation by typing over them.  Save.  If that doesn't work, retype the section and save -- and I do mean a full 'retype' -- characters copied and pasted from Word or the internet or other programs may LOOK exactly the same, but there is a difference the field recognizes even if our eyes do not.

Copy another section, and repeat with that section.

If you've got a giant character sheet with loads of formatting, it will be a PITA to do, so I'd suggest posting the description in an in game thread, and waiting to see if jase will be able to fix.
This message was last edited by the user at 11:23, Thu 13 Oct 2016.

I had to do this for the last couple lines of a Game Introduction I pasted from my PDF.

For info: accented characters trigger the problem as well. I put née in a description and it went blank.

Yeah, that's what actually prompted this thread. The special punctuation was discovered during troubleshooting.

Hokay ... take two on a workaround.  A little convoluted but might just work.

1) You'll need to find and install an add-on to copy plain text without special characters.  One I found for Firefox is Copy Plain Text 2 - make sure you set up Option to Reformat Special characters.   I believe there's an extension called Copy as Plain Text for Chrome.

The problem I then had (on Firefox, your mileage may differ) was that the right click context menu didn't show the copy as plain text option when I selected the text in the edit field for character description.  So ...

2) Turn your browser tab into a a basic text editor:

Open a blank tab, type the following into the address bar and press enter (works in Firefox, supposed to work for Chrome and Opera, supposed NOT to work for IE):

data:text/html, <body contenteditable style="font: 2rem/1.5 monospace;max-width:60rem;margin:0 auto;padding:4rem;">

NB: I saved this as a Favourite to make life easier.

THEN ... click anywhere on the blank webpage and you'll get a flashing cursor ... manually copy and paste the text from character description ... then right click on the inserted text and use the Copy as plain text which should now appear ... back to description and replace old faulty text with clipboard contents (CTRL+V is my go to) ... save, view ... and it should be there !

<fingers crossed>

Sources:

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/5...ing-copy-paste-text/
http://www.pcworld.com/article...sic-text-editor.html

Skald's solution above worked for me.
I use Firefox.
Like he said, make sure you select the "reformate special characters" option from the Copy Plain Text 2 options.

It didn't seem to want to 'copy as plain text' when I deselected the "remove extra empty lines" option. I didn't look deep into this though.

It's a nuisance, but it seems to work. Once you do it once the next times are easier.

For us 'international' folk, the £ sign triggers this issue too :)

Unfortunately the fix is to remove all of the characters that trigger the bug. While this is an inconvenience for me, for people running games not in English, it could be crippling.

As far as I can tell, any character not found on a standard American QWERTY keyboard causes the Character Description field to not display. All my testing shows that this is an issue on the web host side. I've used older browsers as well as updated browsers and all see the same behavior. Looking at the page source shows a mostly empty page.

I know Skald said the ISO Codes work just fine. But they don't for me. I put them in a description and save it. When I look at the description, I see the actual code not the appropriate character. If I then edit the description again, the browser renders the code into the description and if I save it, the Character Description stops displaying again.

I hadn't thought of doing this with the wiki pages I can't access. Turns out I get the same result -- a bunch of header information, and nearly nothing in the 'body' tags. Because the editing links are nonexistent, I can't even try to get in to the original text to find offensive characters. I can't even go into it and recreate the page from scratch.

Until this is fixed, at least half of my game's wiki is empty.

Yup, you're right ... it does work the first time (I posted the entire listing as it shows on the Heaven thread into my character description in one my games and it rendered perfectly), but as soon as you try to edit it the ISO code is changed into the appropriate character ... and the description vanishes because it's no longer an ISO code and thus no longer valid.

Probably needs a tweak to the Edit code to stop it converting, once jase gets time to do that ... in the meantime, best workaround would be to keep a plain text file copy of the description offline (Notepad file or somesuch) and edit that file offline as needed then replace description with the updated version.

Just to share what I did to get my description working again.

I copied the description and saved it on notepad.  Somehow, I figured out if I typed it in, it would work.  But anything I copied from notepad doesn't work.

And then, I copied everything on notepad to microsoft word.  Then, I copied the text from microsoft word to my description and .... voila.  All back.

GMail has that same T_x button too, in the compose message window. Click the A that's next to the Send button, then it's at the far right of the popup ribbon.

Some of my profiles have fixed themselves while I was offline recently... or has this problem been addressed behind the scenes?

Should be better now.  Stupid upgrade to PHP changed the default, which brokes it.

*standing ovation*