You have just open a can of worms ...
Firstly, you will need a version of OS that can display the characters (or
get an add-on font). If you have Chinese Windows installed (get it from
MSDN), the Unicode characters ought to display automatically. If you are
looking at displaying on the browser - its another matter. There are a few
products on the market that supposedly let you input and display Chinese
characters without using Chinese Windows. I have not used any of these, but
they may be well worth investigating.
Also note that there may be more than one way to input characters. You will
also need to take care of keyboard shortcuts - what may be immediately
obvious in English isn't necessarily so in Chinese.
Then you will need to decide on the various formats, eg. Unicode, and other
multi-byte formats. It is easy to support Unicode in your application, but
you may need to import / export to other formats. Then there is database
storage - need to make sure your database supports Unicode, and that you
have allocated enough space to store your data. Though this may seem
obvious, Unicode uses 2 bytes per character, and it is very easy to make the
mistake of not allocating enough bytes.
You also need to consider whether you need to support more than one
language, or more specifically, whether you will need to support more than
one character set in one document. Eg., a word processing document can
contain a combination of Chinese characters & Roman alphabets. If this is
the case, then you definitely want to use Unicode.
If you need to perform searching, you will need to be very careful which
algorithms you use, as most search algorithms are optimised for English, or
other European languages. On the same note, most databases do not sort
Chinese characters correctly, so don't depend on an indexed field to produce
correctly sorted data - you may need to do the sorting yourself
(non-trivial), or perhaps get a 3rd party component to do it for you.
The good news is once you can handle Chinese, your code ought to be able to
handle Korean and Japanese, with only relatively minor changes.
One last note: If you are selling into the Asian market, do beware that the
software piracy rate is high, and it pays to copy protect your software.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On
> Behalf Of Donovan J. Edye
> Sent: Tuesday, 1 February 2000 15:19
> To: Multiple recipients of list delphi
> Subject: [DUG]: Chinese characters....
>
>
> G'Day All,
>
> I know nothing about the above so this question may seem too general
> but......
>
> How would I go about dealing with chinese characters:
>
> - Screen Display
> - Writing to a file (text / binary??)
>
> Some general pointers to FAQ's, HOWTO's etc. would be great.....
>
> TIA
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------
> ----------
> --Donovan
> Donovan J. Edye [www.edye.wattle.id.au]
> Namadgi Systems, Delphi Developer
> Web: www.namsys.com.au E-Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Voice: +61 2 6285-3460 Fax: +61 2 6285-3459
> TVisualBasic = Class(None);
> --------------------------------------------------------------
> ----------
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------
> -------------
> New Zealand Delphi Users group - Delphi List -
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Website: http://www.delphi.org.nz
>
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