[GNC] Use of "dash" as a Separator Character

[John Ralls]

> On Jul 23, 2019, at 11:15 AM, Michael Hendry <hendry.michael at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> On 23 Jul 2019, at 18:55, John Ralls <jralls at ceridwen.us> wrote:
>> 
>> It is indeed. What the tooltip is trying to say is that you can enter any single character except a letter or a number or you can enter one of the listed strings and GnuCash will convert the string to the corresponding character. "dash" really means "hyphen" (U+002d), but regardless that conflicts with the hard-coded account names including imbalance, orphaned gains, and trading accounts.
>> 
>> We can't change the hard-coded account names without breaking existing books, which is too bad. Using one of the dash characters (U+2013 or U+2014) would have been a better design choice as it requires special effort to enter one from most keyboards. I'm afraid the only solution is to make U+002d an illegal separator character and to remove "dash" from the interpreted strings.
>> 
>> The hiding message box is mostly a mac problem, the fix is to make it "transient for" the preferences window.
> 
> I’m not sure what this last sentence means - were you referring to the start-up message that warns of the presence of a hyphen in an account-name that GC has created, e.g. Imbalance-GBP?
> 
> I can accept that this might be a Mac problem, but what does this have to do with the preferences window - which isn’t in use on start-up, and can’t be accessed until the message is closed?
> 
> Here is a screenshot taken after I’d deliberately entered an unbalanced transaction, closed GC and then re-opened it. I had to reduce the width of the Accounts Window to see the warning.
> 
> https://www.dropbox.com/s/glxivc5732xg33n/Screenshot%202019-07-23%2019.10.19.png?dl=0

Sorry, I misunderstood when you were seeing the dialog.

It appears to be set "transient for" the splash screen. I think that's right, but it should also  block opening the main window until you dismiss it. That wouldn't be mac-only.

Regards,
John Ralls