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blog:macos_woes_part_94 [2026/03/23 18:36] – [MacOS Woes (part #94)] hjrblog:macos_woes_part_94 [2026/03/23 18:46] (current) – [MacOS Woes (part #94)] hjr
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-Rather than "Poème", we have Giocoso rendering things as "Poe me": no accent, but an extra space. Look over on the left-hand side of the Giocoso display: there the work is rendered as "Poème" entirely correctly! And here's the thing: both the artwork and the left-hand side text are //both// being read __from the same metadata tag__ (in this case, the ALBUM tag). So what's going on?!+Rather than "Poème", we have Giocoso rendering things as "Poe me": no accent, but an extra space. But look over on the left-hand side of the Giocoso display: there the work is rendered as "Poème" entirely correctly! And here's the thing: both the artwork and the left-hand side text are //both// being read from the __same__ metadata tag (in this case, the ALBUM tag). So what's going on?!
  
 The issue basically boils down to the fact that (unbeknownst to me!) there are actually **two** Unicode renditions of any given character. We might call them "composed Unicode" and "decomposed Unicode", because the point is that è can be represented as a //single//, merged glyph or character, or as a combination of the separate "e" and "`" characters. Linux uses the "composed" version of accented characters... and, guess what?!, macOS uses the "decomposed" version. The net result is that, if you tag your music on macOS, you //think// you're typing a single, composed è, but macOS steps in and stores it as the decomposed "e+`" equivalent. Text applications tend to render either version identically (which is why the left-hand side of Giocoso gets it right), but ImageMagick, the graphical program that's used to generate the artwork and captions for the right-hand side of Giocoso's display, does not. The issue basically boils down to the fact that (unbeknownst to me!) there are actually **two** Unicode renditions of any given character. We might call them "composed Unicode" and "decomposed Unicode", because the point is that è can be represented as a //single//, merged glyph or character, or as a combination of the separate "e" and "`" characters. Linux uses the "composed" version of accented characters... and, guess what?!, macOS uses the "decomposed" version. The net result is that, if you tag your music on macOS, you //think// you're typing a single, composed è, but macOS steps in and stores it as the decomposed "e+`" equivalent. Text applications tend to render either version identically (which is why the left-hand side of Giocoso gets it right), but ImageMagick, the graphical program that's used to generate the artwork and captions for the right-hand side of Giocoso's display, does not.
  • blog/macos_woes_part_94.txt
  • Last modified: 2026/03/23 18:46
  • by hjr