Text and Unicode characters

[tomczak]

I need to annotate a calendar. The text uses some Eastern-european characters - I do have the text in Unicode text file - the characters show fine in Notepad or Word. When I try to cut and paste them to Text transformation, the special characters display as garbage, regardless of the Character Set chosen. How do I do that? Cheers.

[jsachs]

PWP does not support Unicode, but you should be able to enter accented characters using the current codepage. The easiest way to do this is usually to use the Charmap application that comes with Windows. Some text editors (e.g. UltraEdit which I use) allow for explicit conversion between Unicode and other character sets.

[tomczak]

I tried Charmap. When I paste the accented characters to the textbox in Text transformation, they are replaced with question mark. Changing Character Set doesn't seem to help. I use the same font in Charset and in PWP Text. Is there something else that I could try using the Charset? Thanks.

[tomczak]

Even if I equate (I think?) the characterset in Character Map and the characterset in PWP Text, I'm still getting ??? instead of characters I want. For example if the Charmap characterset (Advanced View) is set to either DOS:Baltic or Windows:Baltic (in which I can find the accented characters I want) and PWP Text is set to Character Set=Baltic, I'm still getting the question marks. The font is Arial in both cases. Are there any other settings that would be helpful to diagnose the problem? Cheers!

[jsachs]

I think you may need to find a font that has the characters you want within the first 256 characters of the font since PWP only does 8-bit characters.

[Dieter Mayr]

Maciej

I have the same problem too with the non-Unicode capability of PWP.
A way to deal with it is to set the language for non Unicode programs in the local settings of windows to the desired language.
It works for me with romanian.
A other way would be to create the Text in a other probram, like Microsofts Paint and insert it then with Composite in PWP.

Hope something of this works for you too.

[tomczak]

Thanks. Nothing seems to work (other than Paint+composite). I'm trying to understand it. Between the Font and the Character Set, the first 256 character codes should transfer to the same symbol in PWP as it was in Character Map? So I thought that any character that has Hex code less than 0xFF should work. For instance, if I set the font to Arial and the Character Set in Charmap to DOS: Baltic, an 'a' with a wiggle reads as 0xD0, for Windows: Baltic it becomes 0xE0 - both are within the first 8 bit despite the shift in the table, I thought? I selected and copied the character, and then in PWP Text widget I set font to Arial and the Char. Set to Baltic (or anything else), paste the letter and still see ? instead of what I was hoping for. What's the logic here in terms of how PWP Text takes pasted character (or how Windows paste it). Thanks.

[jsachs]

It's not clear what Windows is doing - all the machinery is buried in the edit control and the paste logic.

[tomczak]

I'm losing the battle: I can't make PWP Text display the accented characters no matter what I do. When I copy a character from CharMap and paste it to e.g. Notepad or Word, it pastes OK. If I copy directly to PWP Text, I get question marks, if I copy from Notepad to PWP Text I get the right characters but without accents.

I'm not sure if I understand it, but wouldn't be this possible: have a small window in Text that would accept a Hex symbol of a character (given that it exists in a Font/Character Set chosen). The hex codes can be read in CharMap. Would it be more reliable than cutting and pasting?

Dieter, could you write in more details how you use Regional Settings to get the Romanian characters? I'm trying to get Polish special characters, but don't seem to be able to.

[Dieter Mayr]

Maciej

I just can provide screenshots from German Windows XP, but i hope it can be useful for you.

Locale.PNG (21.75 KiB) Viewed 5746 times

Control panel / Regions and Language / Extendet
Set the language for non Unicode Software to the one desired.
Then a reboot is required.

Text_Ro.PNG (9.22 KiB) Viewed 5747 times

Text can be written either with the Keyboard set to the desired language or by copy and paste from Charmap.
The keyboard setting is done in the Taskbar, just left of the System Tray.

I don't have a english version of Windows, so i translated from the german terms, so if i have done wrong please correct it.

I hope it helps