Display Czech characters on Labwindows/CVI panel

[telsenbroich]

Is there a way to display Czech characters on a LabWindows/CVI panel (version 8.5.1)?  As an example: "Počítadlo výrobků" (Production Counts).  When I try to paste this on the label for a string control, it displays "Pocítadlo výrobku" (some of the special characters are missing.  I have the font set to Ariel.

Thank you for your help.

[RobertoBozzolo · Accepted solution]

When I had to develop a program in Polish language a few months ago I found that the system must be properly set in order to display all special characters of that language: it's probably the same problem you are facing now. I solved the problem by setting up the following:

• Go to “Control Panel” / “Time and international settings” / “Change keyboard and input method”
• Select “Administration” tab
• Press “Change system locale settings” button in “Language for non-Unicode programs”
• Choose the appropriate language, select OK and exit all dialogs
• Reboot the system

Of course, when truning back to western settings you won't see all special characters in the user interface.

[LuisG]

In newer versions of CVI, you can change the character set of a UI control to "Eastern European", for example, and you can then paste or type that string and have it be rendered correctly. This also allows you to mix and match different character sets in the same GUI. However, in 8.5 that functionality was not yet there and you have to do what Roberto suggested, which implies that your entire GUI would use the eastern european character set, as Roberto pointed out.

- luis

[telsenbroich]

Thank you for the information.  However, changing the system local did not correct the problem.  The Czech characters still do not display correctly (see the attached screen shots and below for the items that are not displayed correctly in the attached example).

PART NUMBER = ČÍSLO DÍLU

SERIAL NUMBER = VÝROBNÍ ČÍSLO

ACCOUNT = ÚČET

Note that the font for each control is set to Ariel.  Do I need a special font to display these characters?

Thank you.

[telsenbroich]

Here are the attachments...

[sinnas]

Hi Roberto, is what you described the simplest solution to this problem for french characters as well? when it comes to older versions of labwindows (v8/9)? 

[RobertoBozzolo]

It seems to me that you should have no problem with French: special characters like for example "Ç" are included in the base character set; when I had to produce French localization for an application of mine I had to apply no special settings in the PC, even with an old CVI6 application on WinXP.

With reference to Czech characters, I can confirm what Luis said: on CVI2009 and 2012 you can select eastern european character set and have texts displayed correctly. I have no time at the moment to reconfigure an old CVI7 machine for Czech local settings and test: I had only to use Polish language and the settings I told you were enough. Which character set have you configured the machine for?

[LuisG]

I looked into this a bit more and I found that there was a bug (#127554) in CVI in version 8.5. which would prevent you from pasting non-western characters from the system clipboard, even if you had set your computer's locale to allow for those characters. This bug didn't prevent you from copying those characters from a CVI control and paste them onto another CVI control, but you could not copy them from the system clipboard, unfortunately

The bug was fixed in version 9.0, which coincidentally, was also the first version in which you could customize the character set of each control.

If you're stuck with version 8.5, the only workaround I can think of is for you to type those characters using the keyboard, rather than pasting them from the clipboard. Once you've typed them into a CVI control, you can copy them from that control to other controls, but you'll have to at least type, rather than paste, the first instance of each character.

To type those characters directly into a control, you have to first change the keyboard mapping when you're using CVI (assuming that you're using an English keyboard):

If you normally use an English keyboard, you have to find out which keystrokes to hit in order to obtain which characters. Here's the layout of the Czech keyboard, to help you with that:

So, for example, to type the upper-case Č, you'll have to hit the 4 key with Caps Lock enabled.

Hope this helps,

Luis

[sinnas]

I find that the problem arrises when comparing two files with accented and special characters (checksum calculation). So i was wondering if Robertos solution is the only way to solve this problem? (CVI 6.0) 

[LuisG]

I'm not sure what problem, specifically, you are referring to. The answer that Roberto gave you is correct, which is that you don't need to specify a different character set for French than what you would use for English. All West European languages (Germanic, Celtic and Latin, except for Romanian) use the same character set. So, I'm not sure exactly what problem you're having. What special characters, exactly, are you trying to compare?