One of our legacy applications is in Delphi6 and we are having trouble in displaying the currency symbol of "Baht" in this application's labels and textedits.
We are using the Unicode of Baht to set the text of the labels/textedits (i.e. 0E3F) but it is always rendered as a '?'.
We tried changing the Font properties of the said labels/textedits to ANSI_CHARSET, DEFAULT_CHARSET (and even THAI_CHARSET) but no luck. And the font type selected is "Microsoft Sans Serif" which has the currency symbol of Baht (not 'MS Sans Serif' which does not have the Baht currency symbol).
Has anyone encountered this in Delphi6 and if so are there any solutions?
Thanks in advance..!!
We are using the Unicode of Baht to set the text of the labels/textedits (i.e. 0E3F) but it is always rendered as a '?'.
The ? character indicates that when the Unicode character was converted to ANSI, no character was found in the ANSI code page in use. Your options:
Use an ANSI code page that includes this character, that is Windows-874.
Stop using ANSI and start using Unicode.
The latter option is better, but of course a little tricky in Delphi 6 which, out of the box, is an ANSI based tool. To make Unicode GUIs with Delphi 6 you need to use the TNT Unicode components.
Windows' application charmap.exe, with advanced view enabled, has a character-set selection, and when you select the character, the status-line at the bottom displays the 256-bits hex code for the character next to the unicode code point.
(Either search for "Character Map" in the start menu, or press Windows-key + R and type "charmap")
If I try it here with "Windows: Thai", I get code 0xDF for the Baht-symbol. So if you write #$DF or #223 in the string, or press Alt while typing 0 2 2 3, it should work.
Native pre-Unicode Delphi controls allow to enter specific local (ex Thai) characters only on a system having this specific system locale.
The workaround used for pre-Unicode Delphi versions is to replace native VCL controls by the TNT Unicode controls.
I am unaware of the TNT Unicode controls status today. You can try to search on google.
Related
I am trying to print SM symbol on report which is using Delphi 6
form to insert symbol on quick report panel.
Alt + 8480 is the symbol in word but when I tried same in Delphi 6
it either change in to box or ?.
When I see ascii character list it contain copyright, trademark etc.
but it does not contain Service Mark symbol and I can print service
mark symbol in Delphi 10.3 so I believe it is the issue with support of
Unicode.
Anyone have idea how to do this in Delphi 6,7.
Thanks.
Because pre-Delphi 2009 Delphi string is not Unicode, but has a CharSet (aka CodePage), you won't be able to directly encode this on Delphi 6,7 on most systems. Some asian charsets may be able to display it, but it will work only if the Windows system non-Unicode app charset is set as such.
Of course, you could try to switch to an Unicode version of QuickReport - using WideString instead of string. But I doubt there is any for Delphi 6/7. Or switch to a newer version of Delphi. But I doubt it is possible for you.
What you could do easily is:
just write '(sm)' text with the current font;
or draw it by switching to a smaller font size, manually writing the two small sm characters, then switch back to the normal font size - I guess QuickReport may have some event for custom TCanvas drawing;
or try to find a font including the ServiceMark glyph in its main #0-#255 page (but I don't know any).
I have a form with a bunch of flags (static images) and below each flag is a tick box. The user selects the tick box to allow them to use a particular language. At design-time, I've set the checkbox captions for each language in their localised equivalent, in this example "Español" (Spanish).
For nearly every language this is displayed just fine at runtime, but for a couple of languages this changes to "Espa?ol". Specifically, this happens when I select Lithuanian and use:
// Note: 1063 = ((SUBLANG_DEFAULT shl 10) or LANG_LITHUANIAN)
SetThreadLocale(1063);
Curiously, if I simply re-apply the caption with the following line in the form's OnShow handler, then it displays correctly as "Español".
tbLangSpanish.Caption := 'Español'; // Strange, it now corrects itself!
The above code might be improved slightly by checking to see whether the runtime caption has a "?" character in it and only then re-apply the caption. The rest of the application displays Lithuanian perfectly (with labels being set at runtime).
Note that "ñ" is extended ASCII code 241. This issue affects a couple of other extended characters such as "ç" (character 231) in "Français". Of interest is that some extended ASCII characters are displayed correctly eg. "¾" (character 190).
Is this a bug in the IDE (using Delphi 7) or just a fact-of-life with legacy ASCII (ie. non-UNICODE) characters? Is there a prefered way to detect incompatible design-time extended ASCII characters at runtime (perhaps based on locale)?
None of the searches I performed gave any explanation about why a character would display as "?". I'm assuming this is because the requested character must be missing from the current Windows codepage, but no reference I could find explicitly says what is displayed when this happens (nor how to overcome the problem if you cannot use UNICODE).
The ? character is what happens when a conversion from one code page to another fails because the target code page does not contain the required character. This is an inevitable consequence of programming against the ANSI Win32 API. You simply cannot represent all characters in all languages.
The only realistic way forward is to use Unicode. You have two main options starting from Delphi 7:
Stick to Delphi 7 and use the TNT Unicode components.
Upgrade to a modern version of Delphi which has native support for Unicode.
I need to display LST ISO/IEC 8859-13 codepage characters on window. Currently I'm using ShowMessage function for this purpose. Evrything displayed fine when windows locale is from this region, but how to deal when I have for example locale English UK? In this case I have just "?" instead of character. It should be some kind of possibility to show regional characters since MS Word displays them without correct locale. But how to do that?
You have two viable, tractable options:
Upgrade to a Unicode version of Delphi that has built in support for international text, or
Use the TNT Unicode controls that graft that support onto pre-Unicode Delphi by using the COM WideString type which is encoded using Unicode.
Word has no problems doing this because it uses the native Unicode API of Windows. On the other hand Delphi 7 uses the ANSI API that exists solely to provide compatibility with Windows 95/98/ME.
Short version:
you must also set the Font.Charset property if you want to be (more) sure that a particular component will display characters in a given charset.
Long version (sorry: i am prone to be wordy)
Using unicode (and you should switch to an unicode version of delphi, if you haven't done it yet) does not guarantee that the fonts installed on a foreign pc will contain the all the symbols you want to display.
Using unicode, moreover, does nothing to force the operating system to choose a font that actually supports the charset you need: even if there is an installed font able to display cyrillic characters, windows will NOT choose that font just because you are asking him to render a string containing cyrillic unicode code points: it will still be using the default system fonts.
So: there always is the possibility that you will need to ask your customers to install a font supporting the charset your application needs. if this can be a serious issue, you should consider the idea of distributing the required fonts along with your binaries (be careful with font copirights).
In second place: if there are components in your application you are SURE that they will always show russian text, well, in such components you MUST assign Font.Charset = RUSSIAN_CHARSET. This is the way of telling windows "I really need to display cyrillic chars in this component, so choose an appropriate font, regardeless of which side of the planet you are running"
It is a common misconception that che charset property is useless with unicode programs. it is quite the opposite.
Another common error is to assume that the "XYZ" font is identical on all windows installations in the world so, if I can see cyrillic chars with Thamoa on my pc, then I am safe using Thamoa for displaying cyrillic in the rest of the world. it is quite the opposite: a different unicode subset gets installed depending on the computer locale.
and... Since AFAIK ShowMessage() uses the system default font, you can't use this procedure for displaying messages containing "strange" characters: you need to write your own ShowMessage dialog box.
EDIT: here is an example demonstrating what I am saying
just drop a TPaintBox component on a form, name it "pbox", and write this OnPaint event handler:
(remember to save the source in utf-8 format, otherwise the russian symbols will be mangled)
procedure TForm1.pboxPaint(Sender: TObject);
begin
pbox.canvas.Font.Name := 'Fixedsys';
pbox.Canvas.TextOut(0,0,'Это русский');
pbox.canvas.Font.Name := 'Fixedsys';
pbox.canvas.Font.Charset := RUSSIAN_CHARSET;
pbox.Canvas.TextOut(0,20,'Это русский');
end;
On an italian pc (and I guess on any west-european or american pc) the fixedsys font does not normally contain the russian characters symbols: the first TextOut will insist in using the FixedSys font and will write garbage. On my pc i get a sequence of black square boxes, for example.
The second textout is made after having set charset=RUSSIAN_CHARSET, so windows will know that we need the russian symbols and so chooses another font. The second TextOut is not using the FixedSys font I wanted to use, but at least it is readable!
On a russian installation of windows, both TextOut calls will correctly render the russian text using the FixedSys font, since russian installations of windows have a russian version of the fixedsys font. and Windows knows it.
You can install more than one locale on a Windows system. If you are using the matching locale then it is the default locale and you can use a dialog with a text field which uses the correct locale / character set. On your development system, where English UK is installed, add the missing language(s).
Unicode is nicer, but not required to display characters from non-default character sets (computers were able to handle many character sets before Uincode was invented). Even MS Wordpad was able to display characters from different codepages, including multi-byte character sets (Korean, Japanese, Chinese) long before Unicode existed.
ShowMessage can not be used because it sticks to the default locale. But can easily be replaced with a custom dialog-style form.
I ve changed the codepage of my system to Russian as explained on this site
PC is rebooted
Then, I created a file in a dir with a name containing special russian character
Then, I ve listed all files in this dir and tried to show the file with typical Delphi 7 code using:
SearchRec: TSearchRec;
FindFirst
showmessage(SearchRec.Name);
FindNext(SearchRec);
FindClose(SearchRec);
The code works well.
When I redo all 4 steps with Vietnamese instead of Russian, the filename shown with showmessage is not correct. Some ? appear instead (see the screenshot):
Please help
This is due to the way Delphi versions prior to 2009 implements their string type. It is not a problem of font, but a problem of character encoding.
All string variables, and also all Windows API calls are performed using ANSI encoding. With ANSI, you can use only one code page at a time. In order to mix code pages (i.e. mix russian and vietnamese encodings), you'll need to process the text and call UNICODE Windows API.
Here is what occurred in your case:
You create a file with russian characters by Windows, using UNICODE encoding;
When you read the file using vietnamese current code page, only the first 127 characters (i.e. ASCII seven chars, e.g. numbers, main punctuations and English letters), are able to be read from UNICODE into ANSI vietnamese: during the conversion, all uncorrect characters are converted as ? in your ANSI vietnamese string.
So you have several workarounds:
Upgrade to Delphi >= 2009, and your string will be UNICODE, so you will be able to mix character sets;
Use widestring for storing your text, and call directly the windows wide APIs - that is, you can't use the VCL units nor FindFirst/FindNext as defined in SysUtils, nor ShowMessage as defined in Dialogs.
Of course, the first one is the easiest!
Output: Period: from 11-Ê®¶þÔÂ-10 to 13-Ê®¶þÔÂ-10
The above output is from a line like this:
FormatDateTime('dd-mmm-yy', dateValue)
The IDE is Delphi 2007 and we are trying to gear up our app to the Chinese market.
How can I display the correct characters?
With the setting turn to Hindi (India), instead of the funny characters I have the "?".
I'm trying to display the date on a report, using ReportBuilder 11.
Any help will be much appreciated.
The characters seem to be correct, only IMO they have been rendered wrong.
Here's what I've done:
copied the string as presented by the OP ("11-Ê®¶þÔÂ-10 to 13-Ê®¶þÔÂ-10");
pasted it into a blank plain-text editor window with CP 1252 (Windows Latin-1) and saved;
opened the text file in a browser;
the text showed up the same as the browser chose the same codepage, so I turned on the automatic detection of character encoding, hinting it that the contents was Chinese;
the text changed to "11-十二月-10 to 13-十二月-10" (hope your browser displays correct Chinese characters here, my does anyway) and the codepage changed to GB18030 (and I then tried GB2312, but the text wouldn't change);
well, I was curious and searched for "十二月", and it turned out to stand for "December", quite suitable for the context unless the month names had been mixed up.
So, this is why I think it's a text rendering (or whatever you call it, I'm not really sure about the term) problem.
EDIT: Of course, it must have had something to do with the data type chosen for storing the string. If the function result is AnsiString and the variable is WideString, then maybe the characters get converted as WideChars and so they are no longer one-byte compounds of multi-byte characters but are multi-byte characters on their own? At least that's what happened when the OP posted them here.
I don't know actually, but if it is so then I doubt if they can be rendered correctly unless converted back and rendered as part of an AnsiString.
Another solution is to use TntControls. They're a set of standard Delphi controls enhanced to support Unicode. You'll have to go through all your form files and replace
Button1: TButton
Label1: TLabel
with TTntButton, TTntLabel et cetera.
Please note, that as things stand, it's not only Chinese which will not work. Try any language using symbols other than standard European set (latin + stress marks etc), for instance Russian.
But
By replacing the controls, you'll solve one part of the problem. Another part is that everywhere where you use "string" or "AnsiString" and "char/pchar" or "AnsiChar/PAnsiChar", you can store only strings in default system encoding.
For instance, if your system encoding ("Language for non-unicode programs") is EN/US, Russian characters will be replaced with question marks when you assign them to "string" variable:
a: WideString;
b: string;
...
a := 'ЯУЭФЫЦ'; //WideString can store international characters
b := a; //string cannot, so the data is lost - you cannot restore it from just "b"
To store string data which is independent of system encoding, use WideString/WideChar/PWideChar and appropriate functions. If you have
a, b: WideString;
...
a := UpperCase(b);
then unicode information will still be lost because UpperCase() accepts "string":
function UpperCase(const S: string): string;
Your WideString will be converted to "string" (losing all international characters), given to UpperCase, then the result will be converted back to WideString but it's already too late.
Therefore you have to replace all string functions with Wide versions:
a := WideUpperCase(b);
(for some functions, their wide versions are unavailable or called differently, TntControls also contain a bunch of wide function versions)
The Chinese Market requires support for multi-byte character sets (either WideChar or Unicode).
The Delphi 2007 RTL/VCL only supports single-byte character sets (there is very limited support for WideChar in the RTL and VCL).
The easiest for you is to upgrade to a Delphi version that supports Unicode (Delphi 2009 was the first version that supports Unicode, the current Delphi vesion is Delphi XE).
Or you will need to update all your components to support WideChar, and rewrite the portions of RTL/VCL for which you need WideChar support.
--jeroen
Did you install Far East charset support in Windows? In Windows pre 7 (or Vista) those charset are not installed by default in Western versions, you have to add them in Control Panel -> Regional Settins, IIRC
Using a non-Unicode version of Delphi unluckily what character can be displayed depends on the current codepage. If it is not one of the Chinese ones, for example, it could not display the characters you need. What characters are actually displayed depends on how the codes you're using are mapped in the current codepage. You could use a multi-lingual version of Windows to switch fully to the locale you need, or you have to use a Unicode version of Delphi (from 2009 onwards).