I want to test my software works on Windows regardless of language. Is there a difference between a localised install Windows 7 and an install with the language changed by a language pack? Is it enough just change language packs to confirm my software works or do I need to install a localised version? In particular I want to be sure that the code page used by the API changes.
It's equivalent, you are perfectly safe using a language pack. I'm a bit concerned about your comment regarding code pages though--Windows 7 natively runs in Unicode (Windows 95/98/ME did not and relied on code pages, but this has changed from Windows XP) and it seems unthinkable nowadays not to develop in Unicode, or are you doing something very specific that requires you to use non-Unicode encodings?
If that clarifies things, on Windows XP and beyond, all the ANSI versions of the APIs (ending with a A) simply wrap the Unicode APIs (ending with a W), doing conversion to Unicode and back to ANSI on the way out.
A customer asked for a text conversion feature from traditional Chinese to simplified Chinese.
I did a little research and apparently it's the kind of thing that can be automated quite readily and Mac OS X even has a system wide service for doing this.. there seems to be something built into OS X to perform those changes, but I'm no expert at internationalization..
Does anybody know how to perform this miracle?
Best regards,
Frank
I think the functionality you requested exists inside an app that Apple shipped with OS X--I don't know of any built-in functionality.
If you are trying to implement conversion, it looks like wikimedia has some code that might do what you want, but you'll have to convert it from PHP:
http://svn.wikimedia.org/doc/classZhConverter.html
Also, it may not be just a matter of converting the characters, although that's most of it... there are also phrases that are different in mainland Chinese (simplified characters) and other places (traditional characters).
According from Emulator Color Depth on Windows Phone 7 forum, I just heard about limitation of Silverlight on Windows Phone 7 that it display only 16-bit color-depth image on Silverlight application just like previous version of Windows Mobile.
Is it true? Anyone can confirm this.
PS.Normally, Silverlight natively support 32-bit color-depth and all modern smart phones also support 24-bit color-depth. I'm not sure what color-depth will be displayed. I have quite bad experience for using HTC Sense in windows mobile 6.5 on my Omnia Pro 2(OLED display with 24-bit color-depth support).
Thanks,
It's been suggested that the minimum spec for devices is 16 bpp, however I haven't seen the documentation for this despite looking for it. OEMs are free to go beyond this... arguably it will be up to them to put their best foot forward.
There was more background to that discussion you linked in other threads, including the one below. The one you linked doesn't offer a lot of context.
Emulator gradient quality different from Blend
I think the thing to do at this point will be to look at what's being done on specific devices.
As yet, hardware spec tables I've seen aren't documenting this detail, but it would be good to see.
I found out (though my other question) that my IME outputs Hangul Compatibility Jamo (U+3130 – U+318F) instead of regular Hangul Jamo(U+1100 – U+11FF).
So I tried asking a question in superuser about other IMEs, no replies yet.
Should I just convert it myself? What exactly does that entail? Is it too complicated? Any ideas on how to? Any help would be appreciated.
Language: Delphi
OS: WinXP
IME: Korean Input System (IME 2002)
There is no reason you could not write an interesting experimental editor control with its own built in Unicode Compose feature. However, before you did that, you might look for a way to change the configuration of the IME. This seems to be a really interesting corner-case you have to work with. I was already surprised about your other question - that Windows has the ability to handle Raw Input from keyboards.
I found that source code for something that says it is the Korean IME is available for Windows CE. You might learn something by studying it, even though it is for Windows CE rather than XP.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee491900.aspx
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I love the way Mac OS beautifully renders fonts (not just browsers). I was wondering if we could somehow get the same rendering in browsers running on Windows?
Someone recommended sIFR but I guess that's useful when I need to use non-standard fonts?
Check out GDI++/FreeType (link, link). It's a highly configurable font-rendering replacement for Windows. With some configuration of hinting, anti-aliasing, etc, you should be able to approximate OSX style font rendering fairly close.
use mactype
https://github.com/snowie2000/mactype
Not sure if this is a setup, but of course, Safari on Windows renders using the OS X rendering algorithm.
Brad is right: use Safari if you want the Mac font rendering algorithm.
Jeff and Joel have both blogged about this before (not surprisingly, around the time that Safari was released for Windows), if you would like more details:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000885.html
I'm assuming you would like to be ablt to use if globally, or at least in IE/Firefox, not just be installing Safari as other have suggested.
Back in the days wen Mac OS X was still in development, there was a plan to release the Cocoa framework for windows, to allow applications written to it to run natively on Windows with a recompile. I suspect that set of Cocoa windows libraries (Yellow Box wasn't it?) would have given you Mac OS X style font rendering but I don't think it was ever released (though you may be able to get very old beta versions of it from somewhere, and I have a feeling some of it was somehow part of WebObjects or something like that).
I suspect the windows version of Safari is using an internal version of the Cocoa libraries for Windows, whcih is why it has Mac OS X font rendering (though I believe recent nightly builds at least have the option to use Windows' native font rendering for those who were complaining about it looking out of place).
Anyway, long store short, unless you're going to write your own font renderer, I don't think there's any easy way to do it (other than using Safari)
Someone recommended sIFR but I guess that's useful when I need to use non-standard fonts?
sIFR will not give you the intended effect. Like Windows's ClearType, Flash's anti-aliasing (which sIFR uses) optimizes towards the pixel grid, not towards accurate representation of the typeface.
You may be able to use Safari's bundled CoreGraphics library to do your font rendering, but you'd likely break Apple's license agreements (especially once you try to ship your app…).
I'm writing a Java application doing some interesting things with fonts and working with some graphic designers, and they want the same kind of font rendering you're talking about. I was able to get pretty close by turning on fractional metrics aka sub-pixel glyph placement accuracy, and anti-aliasing, which are the key differences between Mac and Windows font rendering. Looks pretty good for larger TrueType fonts.
Here's the Java code I used. It's all done with their native font rendering engine (which I believe may be FreeType, not sure exactly).
g.setFont(new Font("Century Schoolbook", Font.PLAIN, 36));
g.setRenderingHint(RenderingHints.KEY_FRACTIONALMETRICS,
RenderingHints.VALUE_FRACTIONALMETRICS_ON);
g.setRenderingHint(RenderingHints.KEY_TEXT_ANTIALIASING,
RenderingHints.VALUE_TEXT_ANTIALIAS_ON);
Now if only I could figure out how to make OpenType CFF fonts work.
Microsoft Powertoy Cleartype Tuner lets you tweak the way Cleartype works. It might help a little bit. Not sure it works on anything newer than Windows XP though.
You could wait until IE9, which apparently has much better text rendering, using DirectX: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2009/11/18/an-early-look-at-ie9-for-developers.aspx
If you want mac osx rendering in firefox, you must use extension Anti-Aliasing Tuner:
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/anti-aliasing-tuner/
Just set anti-aliasing mode as Default and rendering mode as Outline for small and large fonts and you're done.