Upgrading multi-font multi-encoding collections

Question

M.T. Poland asked:

I have different templates for elements with Spanish/French question and Polish answer. The question in Spanish/French uses Western Encoding script and Answer element uses Central European script. The exact opposite is for element with question in Polish and Answer in Spanish/French. If I convert my collection using standard option the text in Polish becomes illegible. I guess if importing using Polish code page will make all French/Spanish element loose their coding.

Answer

If you have problems with default options (due to the need for multiple solutions for separate portions of the collection), you could submit (portions of) your collection for testing and further suggestions?

Until now, nobody reported the need to upgrade "in pieces" (i.e. separate portions of the collection separately), however, if you use various font/encoding mixing tricks, the upgrade might be harder.

Update (May 23, 2012)

I managed to work around this problem and find a solution that is not perfect but worked quite well for me. If you want, you can share it with other users on the FAQ page. Originally my collection dates back to SuperMemo98 so it was not in Unicode buy in different code pages and different templates. What I did is to open collection in SuperMemo15 with default upgrade options so I arrived having correct all Spanish and French spelling like for example "apañarse" but wrong polish ones like "radzioe sobie" then from SuperMemo2008 I did xml export in which the polish text was ok buy I had mixed up French / Spanish words like for example "apańarse" and "radzić sobie" after I did the xml synchronization in SuperMemo15 making decision on each flash card with similar text leaving good Spanish/French and replacing wrong polish ones - for example between "apañarse" and "apańarse" - no replace but between "radzioe sobie"and "radzić sobie" updating. It took some time but was faster that manually correcting all wrong words.

But based on my experience I would recommend to everybody having different collection for different languages because it solves all importing issues.

In general, my opinion is that SuperMemo is very innovative software but every time I must invest additional time to upgrade I'm very upset (I am using SuperMemo for over 5 years). What I am missing is compatibility with SuperMemo for IPad IPhone (at least question, answer type of flashcards - no incremental reading necessary) or support for Internet type of doing repetitions - like connecting from hotel and doing the repetitions - some way to use my SuperMemo15 colletion over the web but not with SuperMemo.net because it is veeeery slooow. I would love to see kindle support or ipad support.

Thanks for good work and keep it up.