🚀 go-pugleaf

nicolasr wrote:

> 1) Are there any prerequisites I need to draw Unicode text
> via the TextOutW API on WinXP and how about Win98?
> (The Api docs state that TextOutW is supported on Win98)

You need to have selected a Unicode font that supports the language you
want. Although Unicode can support 65535 characters not all fonts
implement the entire range. One font that support a wide range should
by now be available on all Windows machines - Arial Unicode MS.

> 2) I have installed several languages like Chinese, Thai, Arabic
> etc.. Does this have anything to do with Unicode or is this
> only necessary for using multi-byte character mode?

Multi-byte only unless they also happen to install a Unicode font.

> 3) Could AnsiString be used to store chinese text (in multi-byte
> format)?  How about Turkish which has only a few additional
> characters to the ANSI set?

AnsiString can be used to hold strings containing one of the small
subset of Chinese characters that have 8-bit codes. Given the huge
number of 'characters' in Chinese languages there is no way that all of
them could ever be encoded in a single codepage. There is a way of
encoding 16-bit codes using pairs of 8-bit characters but I don't think
AnsiString/Win32 supports that.

Turkish will be fine as long as you have the Turkish code page active.

> 4) Can Chinese developers use BCB? I know that
> VCL doesn't support Unicode and I know that there are component
> collections that do support it.

That I don't know. I think Chinese users get used to using a subset of
their language or else resort to the Roman Alphabet.

> But how would a chinese developer
> assign a chinese text in code to a WideString property?

No idea but they have different keyboards so probably it's done that
way. We can use Character Map but surely they have something better.

> Compared
> to for example C#Builder the BCB editor does not seem to be able
> to store Unicode text in source files.

No it can't. They'd probably have to use hex codes in strings.

> 5) My first test for this was to try to assign a single turkish
> character and print it out with TextOutW, f.e.:
>   //user code
>   WideString w = (wchar_t)0x0130;
>   myComponent->CaptionUC = w;
> 
>   //in the component (pascal code)
>   TextOutW(C.Handle, X, Y, PWideChar(CaptionUC), Length(CaptionUC));
> 
> From my Unicode table this should result in a capital 'i' with a dot
> above.  But all I see is a black rectangle (unknown character???).

myComponent->Font->Name="Arial Unicode MS";

As noted above - not all Unicode fonts support all the characters they
could.

-- 
Andrue Cope [TeamB]
[Bicester, Uk]
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