Problems with non-unicode applications

[diff]

Hi,

I have a problem with non-unicode applications. On every homepage it says that you should change the setting in "Regional Settings" to "Chinese". This works fine for all Chinese applications but has a major drawback: on my german system all other applications don't display special characters anymore (Umlaute).

This basically means that you have to reboot everytime you want to switch between the apps.

I'm pretty sure this applies to other languages aswell who have special characters (spanish, french, swedish...).

Does anyone have a workaround for this problem?

Regards,

Dan

[gato]

I ran into that problem, too, and I don't have an answer. But the solution might lie in finding a Chinese character set that has the same encoding for those German characters as your German character set.

What character set do German programmers use, by the way? For example, Americans typically use ASCII or ANSI, and these character sets have a kind of primacy in the computer world because Americans wrote the rule for the computer industry.

The character set mostly commonly use in China, GBK, does have at least the umlaut character. I just checked. The umlaut, ü, is used for one of pinyin tones, all of which should be in GB. I don't know much more about the details.

[diff]

Hi,

thanks for your reply. Actually, we have a two more Umlaute: ä, ö (in case they are not displayed correctly: a und o with dots...). I don't think that this would be a solution as all the other languages would not profit from this, even if I found a character set which supported the german special characters.

Any other suggestions?

diff

[danka]

I have never really ran into that problem, so maybe I don't really know what I'm talking about here. I often mix Chinese with the Swedish characters (å, ä, ö, and occasionally é).

If not using Unicode, I think it's quite tricky (impossible?) to solve. Once when I wrote a GB encoded webpage I wrote å, ä etc. to get the special characters. This wordaround does not apply other than for HTML, though.

[gato]

Any other suggestions?

Have you tried the other encodings that are available in the "Region and language" applet, like "Chinese (Singapore)"? At least that should some kind of a gb encoding. You might also want to try "Chinese (HK)", "Chinese (Macau)", or "Chinese (Taiwan)," but I suspect they use a Big5 interpreter and might mess up your gb characters.

[imron]

The problem is not so much whether or not the encodings have the required character, but whether or not the character has the same character code in both encodings. As far as I'm aware, GBXXX is character-code compatible with ASCII but not any of the Extended ASCII sets - i.e. those used by most non-English speaking European countries.

This basically means that you are out of luck. You can set your default regional encoding for non-unicode apps to German, or you can set it to Chinese, but you can't have both at the same time.

Yes, other (non-English) languages also have this problem, and this is basically why unicode was invented - so that you could display text from multiple languages at the same time without any problems.

One thing that might be of help, however, is something like NJStar Communicator www.njstar.com. It's been a while since I've used it, but it should allow you to run and view non-unicode Chinese apps without needing to change the regional encoding for non-unicode apps to Chinese.