Why does my LabVIEW occasionally display in Chinese?

[codeman]

Windows Vista and LabVIEW 9.01.

Occassionally when working in LabVIEW, different parts will suddenly begin displaying in ( presumed ) Chinese characters - see attached screen shot.  I do not speak Chinese and have never had any of my OS regional settings configured for Chinese.  Usually, if I just close LabVIEW and reopen, everything goes back to normal; although there was one instance where it happened in a VI which I accidentally saved in that form and could not get the characters to go back.  Its more an annoyance than anything else, but it has happened multiple times is a single day and is becoming very aggrevating.  Has anybody else ever seen this, or am I just lucky like that?

-A. Marks

[aeastet]

Could be this.

http://forums.ni.com/t5/LabVIEW/Font-problem-with-LabVIEW-2009/td-p/987722

[Joe D.]

Hi Codeman,

That is deffintly interesting, I do need to ask some basic questions but I will help get this taken care of.

What languages does windows have installed? (Does this go away if you uninstall all asian languages?)

Could you have triggered the hot key to change languages? (Note: Default is Left Alt + Shift)

If you post the affected VI, I will see what I can do to get it changed back to english

[codeman]

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by installed languages. I've never explicitely installed any foreign language character set, though I can't guarantee that it was not installed along with some other package.  At any rate, no foreign language installer items appear in the list of installed programs.  If I look into the Windows Vista "Regional and Language Options" on the "Keyboards and Languages" tab, there is no "Display Language" section which suggests that no language pack has been installed.  I've also experimented trying to make the issue happen using the Left_Alt+Shift key combination, but it has no effect.  I've already repaired the one VI that had been saved in Chinese, though it involved having to manually replace strings.

[Joe D.]

Hi Codeman,

I am continuing to look into this, but I am convinced that it is a windows issue that is just showing itself in LabVIEW.

[codeman]

Perhaps.  But it has never manifested in any other windows program I use.  Seems more likely that it is a LabVIEW issue; maybe related to the one linked to by aeastet.

[Joe D.]

Hi Codeman,

I really doubt that is the case, but have you tried aeasten posible solution?

[JackDunaway]

I'm going to take an educated stab at your problem: your LabVIEW.ini file at some point had the key UseUnicode=True, or you are actively developing using UTF-16 Unicode on your front panels. From my experience, this is OS independent (I've been Unicoded on WinXP, Vista, and 7) and LabVIEW version independent (at least, between versions 8.2.1 and 2009)... it's linked simply to an unreproduceable, intermittent bug in the IDE's handling of 1-byte versus 2-byte string.

All of the "Chinese" characters you are describing are 1-byte ASCII strings that are being interpreted and displayed by the IDE as fixed 2-byte MBCS, or UTF-16. Take a look at all of the characters... there will be exactly half as many (or half minus one) characters of the "Chinese" string compared to the English ASCII string.

Take a look here where I have described the same issue.

[tst]

I just ran into this too for the first time (Win 7 32 bit, LV 2009).

When I first noticed this I saw it in the project window where all the items were corrupted. I closed everything, but I guess I saved one corrupted VI before, because it remained that way and I had to restore it from SCC.

Anyway, here are some controls and constants from that VI demonstrating some of the issues. One important clue is that this only happened to items with the application font. Other items which had the dialog font (which in practice was the exact same font) were not affected.

Another point is that I didn't have the UseUnicode=TRUE line. Or, to be more specific, I did, but it had a ` in front of it, which I believe should have disabled it. Of course, it's possible that it worked even like that.

One other point is that I did do something I almost never did before shortly before this happened - I opened a build spec and went into the Shared Variables Deployment page. This might be a red herring, but it could also be a clue as to the culprit, so it's probably worth looking into.

Also, can we get a CAR on this?

[JackDunaway]

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@tst wrote:

One other point is that I did do something I almost never did before shortly before this happened - I opened a build spec and went into the Shared Variables Deployment page. This might be a red herring, but it could also be a clue as to the culprit, so it's probably worth looking into.

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From my experience, that would be a red herring, because it used to happen all the time on a project with no Shared Variables, and I virtually never visited the build spec.