Carl W. Brown wrote: > Double byte enabling DOS is no minor feat. It is not a > driver but a new > operating system. If you are tight on memory your > applications may not run > because the DBCS support adds overhead. About 5 years ago we > gave up on > DBCS DOS projects because they were too much grief. Hardware > is not that > expensive any more. The excuse no longer holds up. > Considering that a good > Chinese font is 3-10Mb, using DOS just does not make sense. Carl, a lot of special devices and embedded stuff are still in DOS, and there is little one can do (although I would expect that solutions based on newer palmtop OS's also exist on the market). I think I know the kind of hardware Joshua is talking about, as we use them a lot in retail systems: they are not PC's, but rather special hand held devices, used for making inventories in shops. They have an integrated barcode reader and a small keyboard (sometimes only numeric; sometimes with also QWERTY... or ABCDE... alphanumeric keys). I don't understand why you say that double-byte enabling DOS is such a nightmare. Before Windows 3.x became the standard, there used to be lots of Chinese and Japanese software for DOS. There are editors, word processors, libraries, and add-ons (well, TSR's) to make the whole operationg system double-byte. Of course, these solutions did not use Unicode or TrueType fonts, but rather GB or JIS and monospaced bitmapped fonts. But if the solution has to be Unicode, it is not such a big deal to bang out a minimal Unicode library implementing, say: 1) UTF-8 handling, and maybe also UTF-16; 2) Unicode to DBCS (GB or JIS) conversion for the display. The only problem I see is that this old software is not on shops shelves anymore, so getting all the needed pieces requires some digging on Internet or bargain shops. _ Marco
