Few updates worth noting from last night/this morning.
1) Added a new option in the Add/Delete Field Utility to allow users to insert a field into the last position in a record
2) Corrected a problem that allows new fields to be added/deleted after a non-numeric field has been added to a record
3) Corrected the Field count functionality so that it works correctly if a non-numeric field has been added to a record
4) Corrected a bug in the UTF-8 to MARC 8 conversion.
I’d like to expand on exactly what the problem was in the case of #4. Within MarcEdit, there is a set of compatibility characters that have been added to MarcEdit’s translation that are not found in the LC codepoints. This compatibility set includes superscript codes 1,2 and 3, which map to 0xB9, 0xB2 and 0xB3 when typed from a windows keyboard or when inserted from the Charactermap. This is problematic since LC uses the upper code points to represent these characters — which is fine if a record has come from MARC8 to UTF8 and then is going back — since the upper code points are likely to have been used during the translation — but as I said, is problematic if typed from a keyboard. To account for this, MarcEdit includes a compatability set with includes ~15 characters that when typed from a windows keyboard will fall within the 127-255 range and are valid UTF8 characters. Someone processing the data that included a superscript 2 and 3 found that the compatibility set included an incorrect character when an escape code was expected. This has been corrected and updated.
As always, the update can be found at: http://oregonstate.edu/~reeset/marcedit/software/development/MarcEdit50_Setup.exe
–Terry