Unicode issues with IA 8

[sontle]

Hi,
I am using IA 8. We have number of translation files that have contain unicode characters. We are running into problem as follow:

- If we build the load with the files saved as UTF-8, during execution, IA display lot of funny characters

- If we build the load with the files saved as ANSI, during execution, every thing display OK except unicode characters

We are stuck now and not sure how to fix the issue ?


Any idea how we can work around this problem ?

Regards,
Son

[FrancescoT]

Dear Son,

I'm sorry, but It is not clear to me which is the problem you are having.

Can you share more details or can you post a very minimal project sample that demonstrate the issue?

Regards

[sontle]

Our system supports multiple languages. As part of the build, we export the translation files using IA localization feature. These files originally are English files, they then translated and added as supported files back IA. These files contain translated information to be displayed during installation.

This is not a coding issue and I can not post sample project. But how IA treat these translated files. If these files are imported as ANSI, the unicode characters will be missing during installation. If these files are imported as UTF-8, IA seems to display garbage during installation. That is the problem we are having.

I tried to set CODEPAGE = 65001 (UTF-8) when built but still does not work.

Hope this provide you more information. I wonder if you have any method that we can discuss personally, I think we can understand the issue better.

Regards,
Son

[sontle]

I also understand that CODEPAGE pre-compile variable was first introduced in IA 9 correct ? If that is the case, it won't work for me since I am using IA 8. The translation files I am referring to is translations.English, translation.French, ... files produced by IA when we use localization option to export the application strings.


Regards,
Son

[FrancescoT]

Dear Son,

I believe there is big misapprehension ... InstallAware 8 doesn't support Unicode (Unicode support has been introduced with IA 16), consequently you can use ASCII characters only.

Because you are using an old IA version , you need to set the correct "FONT Charset Property" with your dialogs and this, for each non-latin localization that you want to include with your package (This is not necessary with the latest IA versions due the full unicode support).

Please have a look at the link; http://www.installaware.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=9454&start=0

Regards

[sontle]

Thanks Francesco,
We use dialogs, message boxes, ... We can try to set the dialogs, but how about message boxes. Is there any way in old IA like IA 8 that we can set some thing globally for character set ?

Regards,
Son

[FrancescoT]

Dear Son,

All Message-boxes used by your setup are handled by Windows Installer directly and not controlled by IA in any way.
Consequently, in order to have these Message-Boxes working correctly with localized strings, the locale settings for non Unicode application must be properly defined on target system.

Unfortunately, you are using an ANSI version of IA and it is not possible to do differently ... otherwise, you should consider to upgrade it to the latest InstallAware version.

Regards