Bay Six Software

[Brent]

Hi everyone,

I've been interested in ways to make my apps more international for a long time. Unfortunately LB does not make this easy. LB can deal with Latinate scripts (letters A-Z) and accented versions of most glyphs. This is fine for European languages, but it doesn't help for the other 70% of the world.

Does anyone have any experience writing an app in LB that can display non-Latin characters?

[Phuayj]

Well, Brent. Basically, I could tell you that I know Chinese and Japanese. They both are combined by two Ascii characters. I was trying an experiment which I type words in Notepad and open it in LB. But it wasn't successful. The only reason was LB splitted it up into two characters. My next aim was on API texteditor. It wasn't successful too.

So, I think it would be better if there were additional DLLs to create Unicode Editor. That's what I think.

[Phuayj]

Googled, there are no free DLLs, only some sharewares.

Another possibility is using the RichEdit. Haven't tried that yet.

[Brent]

Thank you for the replies, Phua. I am more interested in getting such non-Latin scripts to display in menus and other GUI elements. It would be nice to allow users to type these characters into the code editor for code comments, and allow for the management of comments in multiple languages (e.g. hiding foreign comments as not to confuse the non-speakers). I am attempting to do this properly by separating the language from the GUI.

I think I managed to figure out how to display Cyrillic text using LB. That was mainly a font issue because Cyrillic has 33(?) letters and easily fits in an 8-bit character set. This should also work for Arabic and Hebrew, but these are more complicated by being written right-to-left. I could probably set up these languages on XP, but I'm a little fearful that if I make Windows use a different language, I might have trouble getting it changed back!

[Phuayj]

It maybe even more difficult to do it. But since you've figured it out, I believe that there is not much problems yet.
Well, I fell difficult because I'm not good at API/DLLs.

[Guest]

Brent, due to your request, I found that you could ONLY do that if the user or you or Liberty BASIC supports MUI(Multilingual User Interface). But Yin Jun reported that LB would go wrong under Asian language environment.

Here's where you can check it out.http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/reference/muizone.mspx

[Brent]

Thanks for posting the link. I'm not sure if I've read this already, since I've read a great deal on this subject. We'll just have to wait and see what LB 4.03 does to help when it is released, possibly later this month.

[Kcproductionz]

Maybe Thanksgiving ...

[JohnDavidson]

Hey Brent
Have you made any headway on this?

As you may know, I've been working on a little code editor for JB using the Scintilla edit control.
One of the recent releases was Unicode enabled.
I have pasted French, Greek, Italian, Russian, Vietnamese into it and all appears ok.
The Scintilla docs say there is support for Japanese and Korean but, like you, I have been a bit hesitant to install other character sets on this machine.

Unfortunately, feedback from users who might benefit from using non-Latin character sets in a code editor has been scarce.

John

[Brent]

Hi John,

It's unfortunate that I haven't been able to create enough free time to work on any of my projects. I hope to have more time for LB in a month or two.

Also, I have gotten very little feedback. It is probably LB's lack of native support for Unicode that hurts its acceptance in Asian countries.

I don't know what LB 5 will do to help this situation. Let's hope Carl sees the light.

[JohnDavidson]

I have made a little more headway Brent.
UTF8 enabling Scintilla does appear to render non-Latin characters.
screenshot 1
screenshot 2

John

[Brent]

That's really cool, John! I really need to look into that.

[udix]

I posted a problem on the LB Conforums about Arabic - which Brent answered. So people might look there. But there are still problems - maybe I am just too -- ehm, ok - and wonder whether that would be the right forum here to talk at length about it - but I fear the topic might be overstretched. So I just kepp pondering ....
Udix

[JohnDavidson]

This would be a great place for this discussion.

It looks like Kristina Edit, written in LB, handles Arabic fonts but needs to be 'right to left' enabled.

KE uses Scintillia, a third party dll.
Using Scintillia, I'll see if I can scratch out a simple Arabic test editor this weekend.

John

[JohnDavidson]

Here's a little unicode test file.
It uses the Arial Unicode MS font set by default. This font should be on most machines but it is also available at MS.

You can default change the font face by changing font$.

There is an an included font, Iqraa, if you want something to test with.

John