Fixing FP-40 – Unicode/international textField input in Linux Flash Player

For a long time, the most infamous bug in Potlatch wasn’t actually a bug in Potlatch: it was a bug in Linux Flash Player.

Linux FP doesn’t let you input international characters (i.e. anything apart from ASCII 32-127) into a textfield… and hasn’t done for a long time. So all those overseas mappers who want to type their street name – can’t. Epic fail is, clearly, epic.

Here’s the Adobe bug report for it. Feel the anguish in those comments.

And here’s how you fix it, I think. Many, many thanks to Linux-using OpenStreetMappers for their reports from my little debugging script, and especially to Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason who obviously has a vested interest in it working. I use a Mac so can only go on what others have said!

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