Turkish/Russian/other 'sepcial' language characters

[thinMartian]

Hi,

I am running v8.01 Studio. Install-aware supports russian and turkish (amongst its support for 34 languages).

I have used the localization wizard to export my strings into the translation tool. I have entered translations for german, french etc which all work fine. My problem is when it comes to turkish and russian where they use special characters. How does this work?

The .<LANGUAGE> files that are output by the tool are encoded in ANSI, and not UTF-8. Inputting russian characters results in them being replaced by ?????. Turkish characters are replaced by others, for example my translation should be 'Kurulum tamamlandı' but is changed to 'Kurulum tamamlandi' (‘i’ should be a dot less ‘ı’)

[MichaelNesmith]

What you want to do while translating is work on a Windows system with the system locale set for non-Unicode programs as the locale of your target translation. Perform the translations in that environment and save them as ANSI files, no Unicode. Notepad does this just fine, the original files are ANSI to start with.

When you then load these files on your development OS, you will now see corrupt characters - but they won't be just ??? signs, they will actually be different meaningful characters and this is normal. These special ANSI characters will show properly on target systems with the locale set at runtime.

Unfortunately, since InstallAware supports all the way downlevel to Windows 95 Gold released waaay back in August 1995, it cannot make use of Unicode which is unsupported on the entire Win9X product line. This choice is by design since we believe being able to install off of the same binary on all 32 and 64 bit Windows platforms from Windows 95 Gold all the way to the latest Windows 7 64 bit, is a good thing.

[mwhouser]

It would be really nice to have an option to not support win9x etc. in the UI.

For example, our products only support XP and later, so for us, this is not a "feature". Instead, it's a support issue because unless the locale is correct when running the install, we get an error during our install (due to some of the translations have \\ in the ANSI text, which causes an error during install). So when they phone us, we have to get them to change the locale to Japanese, run the install, then change the locale back.

Thanks,
...Matt

[MichaelNesmith]

This is a design decision. InstallAware is the only installer which supports all - and that is ALL - Win32 and Win64 platforms. As long as your languages are properly localized, they will display correctly when the target system matches the language, which is the intended use case in the first place.

Also see the pre-defined compiler variables topic in the help file, as that contains instructions on how to get your MSI files successfully installing file names containing foreign accented characters. MSI itself is not unicode compliant in this regard, but you can get it all working with InstallAware

[Mateo]

Sorry for the late reply.

It would be nice to be able to choose a code page for each language in the mTranslator.exe app. Wouldn't make it so you didnt have to load up a localized OS to write the strings?