----- Original Message ----- From: "Martin JD Green" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > This means that if I generate a new system (XP Professional) with all the > latest updates but use UK as the standard locale and then try to switch to > FRENCH/FRANCE I still get Francs! To get the locale to use euros I have to > download this tool and run it while switched into the FRENCH/FRANCE locale!
Microsoft has already provided the administrative Euro settings tool that allows users to see the Euro in their corresponding prefered locale instead of the legacy unit: with this tool, users can switch from one locale to the other and have the Euro enabled/disabled. In fact I just think that despite the UK is still not using the Euro, this is only specific to the UK locale and should not apply to other locales, even in a British localized system. So the default locale should be date-based, knowing that, e.g., French/France is now Euro-enabled even in UK: on such British system, a fr/FR user locale should see the EUR at first place before FRF. The limit exists on Windows 9x/ME where the automatic switch is not available for standalone systems, as Win9x/ME only supports one locale at a time (but it exists in domain-level group policies, when Win 9x/ME is used as a workstation in a NT/2K/XP domain). Note that this problem is absolutely not related to Unicode or to the support of the Euro symbol in system fonts and for text codepage conversions. If one applies a Windows-1252 update in a British system, it should still assign and use the Euro symbol at position 0x80, no matter the current user locale, provided that the user locale or any application uses the Windows-1252 codepage, or the system uses this codepage to map its "ANSI" codepage. And even in that case it should map to U+20AC for conversion with Unicode (the UTF-16 transform used in all Win32 Unicode API, or in UTF-8 and other related encoding schemes used on the web). This assignment is not necessary for the DOS/OEM codepage which is most often the CP-850 in Western Europe and does not contain the Euro character (that cannot be seen in a command-line window, and will be displayed as a "?" if entered on the keyboard). IBM (not Microsoft) has defined some variants of the traditional DOS/OEM codepages to allow display and input of the Euro symbol and character. They are not used on Windows, except in text converter tools for NT/2K/XP (the "c_*.nls" system files) such as in MIME-compliant applications like Internet Explorer, Outlook, Outlook Express, or Office programs like Word that need to convert correctly all texts (entered in non-Windows systems) to a Windows codepage or to Unicode.
