I have an old program written in VB6.
I am trying to get it work right on Windows 8.1.
Everything works, except sending text in Hebrew to the printer.
The printer prints "???" instead of Hebrew characters.
It is obvious that this is an encoding problem, but I don't find a way to solve it.
The program works on Windows 7 without any problem!
the relevant code:
Printer.Font.Charset = 177 'Hebrew encoding
Printer.Print "<text in Hebrew>"
Printer.EndDoc
If someone has an advice, I will appreciate it a lot.
Thanks!
It usualy means the font used does not have those characters. Arial has stuff like גּוּלּ֧֧֧֯.
object.FontName [= font]
The FontName property syntax has these parts:
Part Description
object An object expression that evaluates to an object in the Applies To list.
font A string expression specifying the font name to use.
Remarks
The default for this property is determined by the system. Fonts available with Visual Basic vary depending on your system configuration, display devices, and printing devices. Font-related properties can be set only to values for which fonts exist.
In general, you should change FontName before setting size and style attributes with the FontSize, FontBold, FontItalic, FontStrikethru, and FontUnderline properties.
You might need to set the Language for non-Unicode programs to Hebrew. In Win 8 you do it like this.
Related
There are several unicode relevant questions has been confusing me for some time.
For these reasons as follow I think the unicode characters are existed on disk.
Execute echo "\u6211" in terminal, it will print the glyph corresponding to the unicode code point U+6211.
There's a concept of UCD (unicode character database), and We can download it's latest version. UCD latest
Some new version unicode characters like latest emojis can not display on my mac until I upgrade macOS version.
So if the unicode characters does existed on the disk , then ：
Where is it ?
How can I upgrade it ?
What's the process of mapping the unicode code point to a glyph ?
If I use a specific font, then what's the process of mapping the unicode code point to a glyph ?
If not, then what's the process of mapping the unicode code point to a glyph ?
It will very appreciated if someone could shed light on these problems.
Execute echo "\u6211" in terminal, it will print the glyph corresponding to the unicode code point U+6211.
That's echo -e in bash.
› echo "\u6211"
\u6211
› echo -e "\u6211"
我
Where is it ?
In the font file.
Some new version unicode characters like latest emojis can not display on my mac until I upgrade macOS version.
How can I upgrade it ?
Installing/upgrading a suitable font with the emojis should be enough. I don't have macOS, so I cannot verify this.
I use "Noto Color Emoji" version 2.011/20180424, it works fine.
What's the process of mapping the unicode code point to a glyph ?
The application (e.g. text editor) provides the font rendering subsystem (Quartz? on macOS) with Unicode text and a font name. The font renderer analyses the codepoints of the text and decides whether this is simple text (e.g. Latin, Chinese, stand-alone emojis) or complex text (e.g. Latin with many marks, Thai, Arabic, emojis with zero-width joiners). The renderer finds the corresponding outlines in the font file. If the file does not have the required glyph, the renderer may use a similar font, or use a configured fallback font for a poor substitute (white box, black question mark etc.). Then the outlines undergo shaping to compose a complex glyph and line-breaking. Finally, the font renderer hands off the result to the display system.
Apart from the shaping, very little of this has to do with Unicode or encoding. Font rendering already used to work that way before Unicode existed, of course font files and rendering was much simpler 30 years ago. Encoding only matters when someone wants to load or save text from an application.
Summary: investigate
Truetype/Opentype font editing software so you can see what's contained in the files
font renderers, on Linux look at the libraries pango and freetype.
Generally speaking, operating system components that use text use the Unicode character set. In particular, font files use the Unicode character set. But, not all font files support all the Unicode codepoints.
When a codepoint is not supported by one font, the system might fallback to another that does. This is particularly true of web browsers. But ultimately if the codepoint is not supported, an unfilled rectangle is rendered. (There is no character for that because it's not a character. In fact, if you were able to copy and paste it as text, it should be the original character that couldn't be rendered.)
In web development, the web page can either supply or give the location of fonts that should work for the codepoints it uses.
Other programs typically use the operating system's rendering facilities and therefore the fonts available through it. How to install a font in an operating system is not a programming question (unless you are including a font in an installer for your program). For more information on that, you could see if the question fits with the Ask Different (Apple) Stack Exchange site.
In order to detect if font contains some particular character in javascript I've decided that the best way is to have fallback font where ALL unicode characters have exactly ZERO width spaces. This font would allow me to easily check existing of himself, and existing of any character in any other font (except for conrtol characters). I would just check width of character.
Do you know if such font already exists?
It should be very simple to make it with FontForge and scripting. But it is hard for me to get into FontForge and Unicode docs. If someone is fluent in FontForge, could you teach me, or just make this kind of font. I assume it is, what, like 50 script lines on Python?
https://github.com/adobe-fonts/adobe-blank – answered by Mike 'Pomax' Kamermans
Very nice. Just 7kb for woff version! My own attempts to make such a font myself in FontForge gave about 1mb for 0000-1ffff unicode range.
xmgrace is wonderful, but it has some problems when dealing with miscellaneous characters.
How can I make the script small l ($\ell$ in latex) in xmgrace?
I believe the only way to do this is to specify a script-like system font. None of the standard ones are suitable so you will have to make sure that a suitable font is installed on your system.
You can change to any font by enclosing the name in
\f{}
e.g.
\f{Symbol}
or
\f{Century-Schoolbook-L-Bold_italic}
You can see a list of the available fonts (and their labels) by going to the Font tool in the Window menu of the xmgrace GUI.
After typing the special character you can return to your original font in a similar way, or by using \0 to get back to the default font 0.
I thought Julia supports raw unicode input, such as:
julia> test = "π£¢∞§"
"π£¢∞§"
julia> 😘 = 1 ;
julia> print(😘 )
1
However, it seems julia does not support (Apple logo).
julia> = 123
ERROR: syntax: invalid character ""
julia> test = ""
"\uf8ff"
I wonder what's the underlying reason for that, and whether there is a way I can use character in Julia?
I believe this link more properly explains the case of the unicode character that you see as apple's logo.
The problem is that the unicode value used is one of several that is set aside for private use. That means that each operating system, or application, or implementation is free to use those unicode characters for anything they want. It just so happens that Apple has chosen to use unicode character U+F8FF (decimal value 63743, or on the web as either or ) as the Apple Logo. But some Windows fonts put in a Windows logo. And some other fonts put in a Klingon Mummification glyph. Or elven script. Or anything they want. And if it isn't defined in your local font, you'll just see a square.
My opinion is that Julia simply doesn't use this special value for anything. This also explains why your "π£¢∞§" characters work nicely - they are proper unicode characters, more largely supported by different platforms.
As a side note, i too see a simple square instead of the apple logo on this instance.
Edit
Here is a list of unicode characters supported by Julia.
To expand on Alex's answer...
Apple's logo () isn't an official Unicode symbol. I think there are very few commercial logos and symbols in the main Unicode tables.
However, Unicode provides some 'anything goes' areas (called PUAs - private use areas) that companies and individuals can fill with their own symbols, so that their users can access certain special glyphs. The main PUA is U+E000 to U+F8FF. Depending on which font you're using, you'll find all kinds of stuff assigned to these codes. On a Mac, I can usually get the Apple logo at "\uf8ff", with the right font selected, but not the Ubuntu symbol or the Windows logo, unless I choose another font. (There's also a fallback mechanism, whereby if you request a code point that the current font doesn't have, the OS will find a suitable substitute in another font and use that.)
[
In Julia, you can only use certain Unicode characters for variable names. Julia wouldn't allow anything from the private use area anyway, unless some fonts were distributed to every computer and everyone agreed on who had which Unicode point. (Mathematica makes extensive use of PUA symbols in their notebooks, because they can and do install their own fonts, and can then access various glyphs from the PUA in the notebook with guaranteed results.)
You are allowed to use emoji characters as variable names, so you could try the Emoji apple, rather than the Apple apple:
I am facing a problem in my VB 6.0 application that Unicode characters are not supporting. I need to set Chinese characters in field of a recordset in my application-(size of each field is setting from program itself). If we are setting Chinese char into the field of recordset then getting Multiple-step operation error(because of the holding field size is not enough). This error will not fire, if we are setting language to Chinese from Regional settings from control panel in server (Control Panel > Region and Language setting > Administrative Tab > Change system Locale.. > to Chinese )
if we are setting this then time settings of our application will be change. I need some help with out changing from control panel how can we solve this problem.
please help.
Thanks in advance.
In Windows, you can set your regional settings to Chinese, while keeping the time and date format. http://www.techpavan.com/2009/04/07/change-time-format-windows/
For using Unicode in Visual Basic 6 applications, here is an article with thorough explanations and examples: http://www.example-code.com/vb/vbUnicode1.asp
Quoting this link:
Internally, VB6 stores strings as Unicode. Your VB6 program is capable of manipulating strings in any language containing any character -- whether it's Chinese, Japanese, Icelandic, Arabic, etc. It's fully Unicode capable. A single string may contain characters in multiple languages. You can save these strings to databases, files, etc., and there shouldn't be a problem. Problems arise only when trying to display (i.e. render the glyphs) for foreign characters in the standard VB6 controls.
When displaying a string, the standard VB6 textbox and label controls do an implicit (and internal) conversion from Unicode to ANSI. This is the confounding behavior that causes all the trouble. Internal to VB6, the runtime is converting Unicode to the current Windows ANSI code page identifier for the operating system. There is no way to change this conversion short of changing the ANSI code page for the system.
The standard VB6 textbox and label controls display the ANSI bytes according to a character encoding that you can specify. After the Unicode-to-ANSI conversion, VB6 then attempts to display the character data according to the control's Font.Charset property, which if left unchanged is equal to the ANSI charset. Changing the control's Font.Charset changes the way VB6 interprets the "ANSI" bytes. In other words, you're telling VB6 to treat the bytes as some other character encoding instead of "ANSI". Note: VB6 is capable of displaying characters in all the major languages. It simply needs to be told to do so, and the correct bytes need to be in place internally for it to happen.
Try setting the font on those controls to Lucida Sans Unicode to add Unicode Support in.