Unicode

[J. Baker]

I must admit, when I first started programming, I didn't know much about unicode. Then I read an article some years ago about how important it was for developers to compile unicode executables. Since then, I just made sure I incorporated it with my development process.

But I'm curious. Has anyone purchased an app that wasn't a unicode executable and not in your language, so to say? Did it make it harder to use the app? I just never had this issue and would like to learn if there has ever been any issues with this.

Anyway, any feedback would be nice.

[Danilo]

Not all chinese, japanese, greek, russian or german people like english applications.
Many people around the world use the operating system with native language (and keyboard)
settings and prefer applications in their native language.
Million peoples around the world are not able to read any english at all.

[Kukulkan]

IMHO, if you ever like to translate to a language that uses other chars than ISO-8859, you will have trouble without unicode.

Kukulkan

[sphinx]

My VB6 app does not support Unicode hence all text (Arabic) appears as ???? if non-Unicode support is disabled in Windows!

[Kukulkan]

Hi Sphinx,

I think your OS does not support this language (maybe missing font). But VB definitely uses Unicode and supports all kind of languages. It is not a problem of the application, if your OS does not support you with the needed fonts. Simply try to run "charmap" on your windows computer to find out about the possible chars (use the execute field in your start-menu). Users who like to see your program in arabic translation will surely have this unicode support enabled in windows

Kukulkan

[Zach]

Unicode only solves half the problem, however.

There still has to be the effort on the developers part, to translate the application to other languages. Unicode simply makes it easier, but Unicode or not, if you get an App that is untranslated in Unicode you'll still be looking at a foreign language you don't understand (vs a bunch of ???? and other weird symbols)

[MachineCode]

I read an article some years ago about how important it was for developers to compile unicode executables.

I only speak English, and I'm a small independent developer. I don't have the time, money or resources to have my apps translated. What advantage would compiling to Unicode have?

(BTW, this thread isn't off-topic at all; it should go in "General Discussion").

[Joakim Christiansen]

I don't have the time, money or resources to have my apps translated.

Many people gladly do that for free if they have the option! Some likes the attention and will brag to their friends about it (that they made the translation file) if the program is "popular".

[MachineCode]

Interesting, Joakim; especially about the bragging rights... would be a good way to get free advertising.

But a question about translation now: Microsoft said in one of their books, that when translating from English to another language, you should allocate at least 33% more space than the English word, since other languages are usually longer. For example, I have a ButtonGadget() of width 40 pixels and the text "Send" on it. The 40 pixels means the gadget neatly encloses the text, and means I can have a smaller overall GUI too.

But if I extend the ButtonGadget() to 40 + 33% extra pixels wide, and also for every gadget in my app, them my GUI gets bigger and has lots of wasted "white" space for English users. I don't like that, which is actually another reason that I haven't considered translation yet.

How does everyone else here deal with translations and gadget sizes that go with them?

[J. Baker]

(BTW, this thread isn't off-topic at all; it should go in "General Discussion").

Could go either way. I posted here as it wasn't specifically PureBasic related.

How does everyone else here deal with translations and gadget sizes that go with them?

Now that's an interesting question. Hopefully some one knows the answer.

[c4s]

What advantage would compiling to Unicode have?

Easy: I once had a rather expensive backup utility which didn't support Unicode. So this program wasn't able to backup some files! I started to hate it when I realized that big issue and immediatly switched over to a much better program. I would never recommend that software company and will never buy anything from them again...

[MachineCode]

So, even if our apps don't have localized text, they can still have problems with filenames if we don't use Unicode?

[Kuron]

So, even if our apps don't have localized text, they can still have problems with filenames if we don't use Unicode?

Correct.

[blueznl]

Unfortunately, though Unicode makes things easier, it's still possible for a localized version of Windows to create files that cannot be read or used on different (other locale based) machine, even with Unicode enabled...

Funny enough, those files can always be renamed, and after that can be manipulated again.

Still, without Unicode enabled things can get very messy, so if possible enable it.

[luis]

Many people gladly do that for free if they have the option! Some likes the attention and will brag to their friends about it (that they made the translation file) if the program is "popular".

Sometimes even people with good intentions make horrible translations. There are tons of programs written in English (originally) and then translated by people not up to the job (in reality probably both the author and the translator shares some responsibilities) . Some text is truncated because the space for the English text was smaller, some words are poorly translated because the translator know maybe the two languages (a little) but not the technical terms used by the software, and so on.

The first thing I do when I download some shareware or freeware software defaulting to Italian (sniffing my OS locale) is to force it to use English to protect my brain cells.