I have an application which is using English - Development Language and Danish.
Because I don't know Danish it would be easy for me to have both languages available for a target that I am using for development and to keep only Danish for the target that I use for production/Danish testers.
It is possible to achieve this?
Thank you!
I am writing software (Delphi 2009 Unicode project) which depends on third party library (.dll).
The library is working fine in English language but when I switch the language of application to Russian some characters are not shown correctly. (I can see ?????).
(Application uses several languages - most of them is working fine but especially Russian customers can see this bug).
I found out when I run the software with AppLocale (Russian language) everything works fine.
Also if in Windows Regional settings I set Language for non-Unicode applications to Russian I can see the characters correctly.
How can I achieve the same with code?
As I do not have sources for the library I cannot modify it. I suppose I need to initialize my software the same way as AppLocale do.
Something like calling SetThreadLocale() in application to affect whole application - and also the library.
There is no problem to write C/C++/C# library if this cannot be achieved directly in Delphi.
We are embedding Arial Unicode Font (limited range only) within our flex application to support English, Japanese, Chinese & Korean languages, earlier We were using Verdana system font for english, We are observing some application slowness while entering/displaying the non-english characters, I am not sure if it's really because of our above mentioned css changes or something else, Is anyone aware of any kind of limition with regards to application performance for the embedded fonts within Flex Application (MX Components).
Please advise/suggest.
Please also do advise if anyone is aware of any lightweight font file that can support English, Japanese, Chinese & Korean languages only.
Thanks
Abhishek
As you know, we can install files for East Asian language in Control Panel-->Regional and language options-->Languages tab-->Supplemental language support.
The question is: if I don't install this files (by unchecking the checkbox) for my English Windows XP, does that mean none application on the PC can display Chinese characters properly?
Or, if a app says that it's "UNICODE compatible", does this mean that it can handle the Chinese characters properly even when we don't have East Asian language support on our pc?
(I don't have the permission to uncheck the checkbox and test it on my own, so I hope I can get an answer from you guys.)
Any answers will be appreciated.
If an application is operating system dependent, you won't be able to see Chinese characters without adding supplemental language support. But os independent softwares will not be affected by that. So, it completely depends on the softwares you are using.
When downloading both Firefox and Chrome, I've noticed that the default version I got was in my native tongue of Hebrew. I personally don't like my applications in Hebrew, since I'm used to the English UI conventions embedded in me since long ago by:
The lack of choice: Most programs don't offer interfaces in multiple languages and when they do, those languages are usually English and the developer's native tongue.
Programming languages which are almost completely bound to the English language.
My question then is this:
If you translate your applications, would you limit the UI to the user's native tongue or give them the choice by enabling more than one language pack by default?
Which language would your application default to (which is interesting mostly if you only install one language pack with your application)?
And also generally I'd like to know how much value do you put into translating your applications on a whole.
I've helped develop an application that was used by Dutch, English, Spanish and Portuguese speaking users. Because the application installed from CD we just added all the language packs. Mostly because it saved us a lot of work not having to maintain 4 different versions.
If your application distributed from a website and you have to support more than only 4 languages I can imagine you don't want to let everyone download every language pack. But only distributing the native languages of people downloading the application seems a bit restrictive. Most people I know actually like their software in english. So at least adding the english language to all the versions makes sense.
I've never written an application for use by a large number of people, and never for anyone that didn't use English as their language, but if I did, I would probably take a route that installs all available language packs at install (unless the user did a custom install, where I would allow them to choose language packs) and then switch between languages as an option inside the program. If I had to only choose one language, I would choose English if I was doing all of the work, or the native language of the users if I had a translator.
When writing an application for multilingual use, I use Microsoft's Best Practices for Developing World-Ready Applications, which includes retrieving the current CultureInfo from the OS and using that as the default language pack.
I usually try to ship products with all available sets of localized resources. Upon a user's first launch of the product, the UI is presented in the localization most closely matching the OS on their machine. Once within the app, the user has the option of switching the UI to one of the other available localizations.
I think it is very important to provide localizations that match one's target markets. Most "normal" people (not software developers!) prefer by far to have a UI in their native language.