GML encoding issues with yEd on OS X

Question

I have discovered a problem that is probably related to the JavaApplicationStub binary which resides (in my case) at "/Applications/yEd/yEd.app/Contents/MacOS/JavaApplicationStub".

I have some GML files that are encoded in UTF-8 and contain some non-ASCII characters (e.g., "←") in HTML node labels. When I used yEd with Ubuntu Linux, these files were visualized without any trouble. With Mac OS X, however, weird characters are displayed instead (e.g., ",Üê"). 

When I try to launch yEd by loading yed.jar, either with Java binary bundled with OS X or with Java binary from Open JDK 7 installed from MacPorts, yEd handles this situation correctly, so I guess the problem is related to a binary launcher program.

I use yEd 3.10.2, Java 1.6 (stock OS X) and 1.7.0_21 (MacPorts), OS X 10.8.5

 

Regards,

Kostiantyn

Answer 1

The GML file format is quite old, and at the time of its inception, the inventors apparently didn't care about encoding issues...

What happens is this: When writing a GML file, yEd uses the system's default character encoding. Obviously, on your Linux system this was UTF-8.
As far as I know, however, the Apple Java SE6 uses "MacRoman" as the default character encoding. And so does yEd when reading your GML file. This is the conversion where information is lost.
(I'm not sure why it works for you when you run yEd.jar with Java 1.6 on the console, though.)

My advice would be to open the files on your Linux system, save them as GraphML, and then open these GraphML files on your Mac.