LabVIEW
UI Multi-language with Unicode
@paul_cardinale wrote:
wiebe@CARYA wrote:
Just want to mention that MBSC is unicode, or actually an encoding for unicode. A very old one, it only supports unicode characters included in the current code page (and font).
If you use 'unicode' there are still lots of encodings to choose from. UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32 are just a few. Some come in MSB and LSB variants... Plenty to choose from (not a good thing here).
To render properly, you also need a font that actually contains the characters. If a character set contains Chinees, it often has Cyrillic, Greek, etc., as these are so small in comparison. But fonts not always contain traditional Chinees and simplified Chinees, as both are huge.
It's a big mess; the result of everyone trying to solve a difficult problem in parallel.
My new data type will clean up the mess. With my Unicode string data type, there are no encodings (UTF-x, etc); each element is a Unicode character. Under the hood, it will have to use some UTF-16 LE, but the user won't have to deal with that.
That is puzzling, because at some point the programmer has to type in a character. If I want a unicode character and only have a LabVIEW MBSC string how do I tell your tools what character to display?
We could have a look at the tools, if we knew where to find them. Maybe I just mist the link?
Search LabVIEW like a graph!
@paul_cardinale wrote:
wiebe@CARYA wrote:
@paul_cardinale wrote:
wiebe@CARYA wrote:
Just want to mention that MBSC is unicode, or actually an encoding for unicode. A very old one, it only supports unicode characters included in the current code page (and font).
If you use 'unicode' there are still lots of encodings to choose from. UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32 are just a few. Some come in MSB and LSB variants... Plenty to choose from (not a good thing here).
To render properly, you also need a font that actually contains the characters. If a character set contains Chinees, it often has Cyrillic, Greek, etc., as these are so small in comparison. But fonts not always contain traditional Chinees and simplified Chinees, as both are huge.
It's a big mess; the result of everyone trying to solve a difficult problem in parallel.
My new data type will clean up the mess. With my Unicode string data type, there are no encodings (UTF-x, etc); each element is a Unicode character. Under the hood, it will have to use some UTF-16 LE, but the user won't have to deal with that.
That is puzzling, because at some point the programmer has to type in a character. If I want a unicode character and only have a LabVIEW MBSC string how do I tell your tools what character to display?
We could have a look at the tools, if we knew where to find them. Maybe I just mist the link?
There are allegedly ways to type Unicode characters in Windows (but I can't get to to work properly). I've also created a dialog box for browsing Unicode characters and inserting them.
I haven't posted anything because it's nowhere near ready to use; but since you want it, I've attached it. Some things are working well, some are buggy, some aren't working at all, and there's a lot yet to be created.
I don't have an immediate use for Unicode. And to be fair, I have not even evaluated the unicode options that are available in LabVIEW. I've made unicode work for the PDF Toolkit, and that's enough for me for now to stay away from it. I recognize some code, but I used code page files to convert MBSC to unicode. This enabled me to generate a Chinese PDF on a PC that didn't have a Chinese code page.
