Strange text encoding for font name in Carbon

Targets macOS
1

There’s something strange about the text encoding for font names coming out of StyleRun for Carbon:

  TextArea1.Text = "Test"
  TextArea1.SelStart = 0
  TextArea1.SelLength = 4
  TextArea1.SelTextFont = "Arial"
  dim st as StyleRun = TextArea1.StyledText.StyleRun(0)
  dim s as string = st.Font
  dim enc as TextEncoding = s.Encoding

On my system, running Xojo 2014 R1.1, I get the following bytes back for the font name:
41 00 72 00 69 00 61 00 6C 00

This looks like UTF-16. Encoding returns a TextEncoding with the following values:
base: 63452
code -1073743908
format: 15
internetName: “” (empty string)
variant: 1023

Converting to UTF-8 doesn’t work:

dim s1 as string = ConvertEncoding(s, Encodings.UTF8)

s1 is set to the empty string (i.e. the conversion silently fails).

Has anyone else run into the issue?

2

dim s as string = DefineEncoding(st.Font, EncodingsUTF16)
dim enc as TextEncoding = s.Encoding

3

That works in this case but is every font name guaranteed to be UTF16 in Carbon?

4

unfortunately no
some are some aren’t
Joe’s looking at the details but it goes way back to world script or one of those really old managers