Characters not being displayed when language settings are changed.

[the_hunk]

Hi,
I have been generating a report which contains characters like â‘  and â‘¡.
These characters were being displayed properly uptill now. But one day it
was viewed on a machine with Language for non Unicode programs set as
Japanese and Word was not able to display these characters.
I tried this on my machine too by going to Regional and Language Settings
and in the Advanced tab setting the Language for non Unicode programs to
Japanese. After restarting my machine I also got the same problem.
This report is being generated programmatically and is viewed by the users
of our application. So, we need a way to display these characters properly
irrespective of the Language settings.
Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks in advance.

 

[grammatim]

I believe the circled numbers (and other odds and ends of romaji)
occur only in Japanese fonts, and Unicode and non-Unicode CJK fonts
have quite different codings, so if you've typed them in a Unicode
font, they won't correspond in a non-Unicode font. (Most readers of
this newsgroup probably won't be able to see the two items -- 1 in a
circle and 2 in a circle -- because they haven't activated the
Japanese capabilities in their Windows.)

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Hmm. I can see them. The message is in UTF-8. I don't think I have
explicitly enabled Japanese capabilities, but I do have Arial Unicode MS and
MS Mincho installed.

 

[grammatim]

So how many people have a Japanese font (Mincho) installed but not a
Japanese IME? You can't type in it.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Well, I do, for one. I used it to insert specific characters (using Insert |
Symbol) in my Web pages at http://sbarnhill.mvps.org/Japan/Japan.htm,
notably http://sbarnhill.mvps.org/Japan/Sidebars/Language.htm

But I think that MS Mincho is installed with Office/Windows by default
because there are certain characters in that font that Word (transparently)
uses even when you think you're entering something in the Default Paragraph
Font.

 

[Tony Jollans]

But I think that MS Mincho is installed with Office/Windows by default

Yes, it is. It used to be in Office but is now in Windows so almost
everybody will have it.

As for the original question - if changing the language for non-unicode
programs affects the way you see things, the program you're using must be a
non-Unicode program. As such it will be using a code page to display (a
limited number of) non-ascii characters, and changing the language will have
changed the code page in use - I think!