Display Chineese or English in LabView

[ETone]

Is it possible to display information in Chineese or English based on a switch selection in LabView. If so, how difficult is it? Your feedback is greatly appreciated!

[Dennis_Knutson]

It is possible to switch languages for most if not all information. The NI product TestStand does this. Controls and indicators display captions instead of labels and the information is read from an ini file when the program starts. It's not so much difficult as tedious. You create a property node for everything and use Caption.Text to set the control/indicator names and the Strings[] property for things like text rings. Pull down menus can be built dynamically from text in an ini file as well. To select the language, have a drop down menu item for example that allows the user to select and write that selection to an ini file.

[ETone]

Dennis, thank you for your quick response! I am not familiar with TestStand, do you know if this can be done using LabView 6.1? Thanks again for the help!

[Dennis_Knutson]

What I described is how it is done with the LabVIEW TestStand user interface and is done with ini files that contain all of the text for captions, menu boxes, etc. LabVIEW has all of the functions you need for reading ini files and the properties I mentioned are all in LabVIEW 6.1.

[waldemar.hersacher]

We have some applications where the language of the front panel will be choosen by the operator. We hold the languages in spreadsheet files. The first column holds an identifier and the rest of the columns hold the text. The first row holds the identifier of the language of the column. The first cell is always empty. Read the file line by line and separate the strings searching for the separator sign. If you choose a ';' for the separator be aware that this can also be part of the text. In this case the text is enclosed by a '"' sign. Two '"' will be interpreted as part of the text.
Waldemar

[Irene He]

All the methods the other people described above are all correct, but still there is one thing you need to note, after you finally change the caption to Chinese, you still may not see Chinese characters there, instead it may show ???, it's because LabVIEW deos not fully support unicode. If you don't work on a Chinese operating system like Windows in Chinese version, you then need a supporting software like China Star (CStar) to run in background, that way you can write Chinese in LabVIEW string control or caption or label.
Irene He
Irene_he@yahoo.com
www.geocities.com/irene_he

[pavitrabaxi]

Hi Irene,

Im having a similar problem of displaying chinese characters on an english version of Labview (8.0) installed on an english version of Linux.

I have installed chinese fonts in my linux system, somehow this change is not reflected in Labview. All the other programs except labview are able to display chinese characters.

Please help.

Pavitra

[Joe_Guo]

you can also try the Export Strings and Import String from Tools >> Advance menu.

-Joe

[pavitrabaxi]

HI Joe,

Thanks for the reply.

I did what you told me to do, but the problem is that im not able to get the fonts in chinese. I have changed the regional and language settings to chinese. Instead of chinese characters im getting question marks on the front panel.

Im attaching 2 screen shots, which might help in explaining my problem better

 

[Joe_Guo]

did you also replace the font property in the imported string and in labview for the contorls? if still not working after change the font, then you might want to set the "Language for non-Unicode program" to "Chinese", which is at: control panel >> Regional & Language >> Advanced. however, this option may cause some non-unicode program to crash (but labview is not one of it). this option also allows you to type chinese anywhere.

-Joe