Newbie on an Android phone needs help with text editors

Factual Questions
1

A month ago I finally got myself my first smartphone - a Samsung Galaxy Note II. I love the big screen, but the learning curve is slow and tedious. This was expected and not at all a surprise, especially since a very large portion of my usage is reading and editing TXT and DOC files, which most people are totally unconcerned with.

In a previous thread, I had asked for advice comparing Google Drive vs Dropbox, and I’ve settled on Dropbox, mainly because Google reformats the files, making them unreadable in Word back on my pc. I like the way Dropbox syncs, but my question concerns exactly what apps are used by Dropbox for reading and editing.

Here’s what happens: I go into Dropbox on my phone, and I tap on an ordinary text file, and it opens up for reading or editing. The main problem (and many may consider this a minor annoyance, but for my needs it is a big deal) is that many characters appear as plain blank spaces. This includes “curly” quotes and apostrophes, ellipses (the 3 dots that are a single character), em-dashes, and similar stuff. A simple solution might be for me to not use these characters to begin with, but I can’t do this because these files were originally written elsewhere, not by me, and I’m reading and/or editing them.

What app am I actually using for this? If I knew which app it was, I could ask about changing the encoding to make these characters visible, but I don’t even know the name of the app, so I am really stuck.

Prior to getting this smartphone, I did this stuff on my Palm PDA, using Documents To Go. So I ran the following experiment: I downloaded the free (read-only, no editing) version of Documents To Go for the Android. I tried looking at the file to see if the special characters were visible, but Documents To Go (the free version, at least) can only open files on the SD card, not the ones that are in Dropbox. Okay, so I copied this one file from Dropbox to the SD card, and was happy to see that all the special characters DO appear.

So as I see it, I have two different apps on my phone that I can use for reading text files, one of which (Docs To Go) shows these characters but doesn’t like Dropbox, and the other (whose name I can’t figure out) does not show these characters but does work with Dropbox.

So I have come to the Teeming Millions with several problems, and I hope someone can help with at least some of them:[ul][li]When I open a file from Dropbox, how do I determine which app I’m using?[/li][li]Does that app have any settings which might help with these characters?[/li]Can anyone suggest another editor which does see special characters and is compatible with Dropbox?[/ul]Thanks!

2

Maybe I’m not following, but is there any reason you can’t just download these files as binaries to your phone and open them from there, edit them natively using whatever software one would normally use in the Android environment for that purpose and then upload it again back to Dropbox as a binary?

3

I don’t know what you mean by “as a binary”, as opposed to downloading and uploading the file as a file.

The “software one would normally use” seems to be Polaris Office 4.0, which came pre-installed on the phone. I have now figured out that that’s the app which does not show the special characters. And there is almost now support for it at all, which is why I went looking for other apps.

4

What I mean is, rather than opening the file directly from dropbox, can’t you simply download it as a file without opening it?

Once you have the file as an intact, unopened entity on your phone, then there must be dozens of android apps from which you can choose to edit it - no?

5

Yeah, I suppose so, but my first two or three tries all failed, so I was hoping for a suggestion for a better app, or maybe someone could show me what I’m doing wrong with what I already tried. I know that most people use their phones for entertainment, but I can’t be all that alone in the productivity area.

Thanks for trying!

6

I don’t have an Android phone, but googling suggests the DropBox app has its own built-in editor. So maybe that’s the editor you’re using that can’t display special characters.

More googling indicates there are a bunch of text editor apps that can directly access your DropBox account. Maybe you could try one of them: PlainText, Epistle.

7

Epistle looked promising. But it shows the special characters as a black diamond with a question mark inside.

PlainText seems to be for Apple only. I’ll keep looking. Thanks for the ideas!

8

So I take it you’ve figured out how to open a file using an arbitrary app? (Personally I’d recommend using DropSync or FileSync to do a true 2-way sync between Dropbox and a local folder instead of using the Dropbox app)

Anyway, a quick google search found the 920 Text Editor which claims to automatically detect the file encoding. I’m sure there are others that may or may not work better.

(p.s. There are a lot of people who use smartphones for work, and there are a lot of productivity apps out there. But these days, very few people still use plain text files on a regular basis.)

9

This is true, but I’ve always felt that when possible, one should avoid proprietary formats. Something generic, like a plain text file, ought to be much more portable than a Word document, right? That logic always seemed bulletproof to me, but it seems that the real world doesn’t work that way, and in fact the Word format has become more portable. And I have literally thousands of these text files that I’ve collected over the years.

Your post did inspire me to run more tests, and I was dumbfounded by the results.

On my PC, I took a short piece of text which included some of these characters, and I saved it both as a text file and as a word document. Then I moved them to my Dropbox, and then went to look at them on the phone. On the phone, I went to Dropbox and tried to open both files.

When opening the Word document, it offers me my choice: “Complete action using: Polaris Office / Documents To Go”. Either way, all the characters are properly shown. However, when I tried to open the text file from Dropbox, I was not given any choice of apps. It simply opened in Polaris, without the special characters.

And this is now driving me crazy – Polaris will show the special characters in a Word doc but not in a text file, which makes no sense. And Documents To Go won’t even open the text file at all, at least not from Dropbox.

… I’ll go look at the “920 Text Editor” now. Thanks!

10

And, so far, it’s not too bad! I’ll give it a couple of days. Thanks again!

11

No, there are many different character encoding schemes for “text files”. You’re usually safe if you just use the basic 128 ASCII characters, but once you start using other characters, you can run into a lot of compatibility issues.