This may be a little hard to describe but I’ll do my best, sorry if it’s long winded. In a converted database from Pan 6 I have a field for phone numbers. The field has an input pattern of __-- If I simply type in a number it formats correctly, typing 5169213535 results as 516-921-3539 as it should.
Now comes the oddity… if I copy a number from another form or text file or whatever but only copy the phone WITHOUT the area code, for example 921-3539, then go to my Pan X database and first type in the area code then immediately past the number I get this 516921-3539. If I click between the are code and exchange and insert the dash then what happens is two dashes appear and then a split second later they are replaced by a longer dash symbol either by Pan X or the ghost haunting my Mac. S
A note of comparison to Pan 6 (sorry Jim) I checked to see if Pan 6 would do the same and saw that when I typed the area code Pan 6 immediately added the dash so my pasting in the number was inconsequential.
So what is this long dash replacement? Seems odd.
EDIT!! I now see this behavior in all my Pan X files even in simple text boxes with no formatting. Type two or more simple dashes and they change to one long one no matter how many you type!
This is not caused by Panorama. It sounds like you probably have an automatic expansion set up in System Preferences for --, automatically converting it to –. Look in the Keyboard>Text panel of System Preferences.
Thanks Jim, actually I had checked all that before posting but I’ve taken a 2nd look. I had nothing set specifically for that HOWEVER I discovered that if you have “Use smart quotes and dashes” checked it caused the conversion. The odd thing is that it didn’t do it in Pan 6 so that is what let me to suspect Pan X.
This is yet another consequence of Panorama 6 being based on the ancient, deprecated (and now removed) Carbon APIs. The smart substitution doesn’t work with applications that use Carbon API’s. Most likely Panorama 6 is the only Carbon API application you have used for several years, so you wouldn’t realize that. For close to a decade Apple has let the Carbon API’s linger, but they haven’t really been fully supported. The writing was on the wall, which was a major motivation in writing a new version of Panorama that was completely free of these old API’s (most of these API’s date back to the original Mac in 1984).
