Controlling font on initial \"unpacking\" dialog

GregS · Post by **GregS** » Thu May 07, 2009 4:37 pm

Hi. I'm new here and this may be an obvious question, or maybe not. I'm new to InstallAware, but I have a defect to fix in our installer and our main installer guy is on vacation, so I have no one more experienced to ask.

Our product has an Arabic version and we have an Arabic language version of our installer written in InstallAware. Our Arabic installer is working fine. However, there's a problem with those little dialogs that InstallAware displays when it first starts up. First we see the InstallAware Wizard dialog, the one that shows a progress bar and that says that InstallAware is verifying the contents of the setup package. This is displaying in English. That's not the problem - we're fine with this being in English.

Here's the problem: If the user clicks Cancel on the progress bar dialog, the Cancel dialog that comes up (the one that says "Are you sure you want to cancel?") is displaying garbage characters for the message. The buttons are labelled correctly in Arabic, but the message is showing junk.

I think this is because the dialog is trying to use a font that is not supported on the Arabic version of Windows XP. So my question is: Is there some way that I can set the font that these InstallAware dialogs use? Or if not, is there some other answer to how to fix this?

It's fine if this Cancel dialog is showing English. We just don't want it to show garbage.

Thanks,
Greg S.

MichaelNesmith · Post by **MichaelNesmith** » Thu May 07, 2009 6:15 pm

You can change the shared installer strings from Arabic to English to have the message show in English.

Windows sets the font of these system dialogs automatically, so the behavior you are seeing on non-Arabic Windows systems is normal. You can also set the target system locale for non-unicode programs to Arabic and that will also probably be another cure for your malaise.

GregS · Post by **GregS** » Fri May 08, 2009 9:43 am

Thanks for the reply. I'll look into the shared strings and the target locale things.

However, I need to add some clarifications:
-- The error I'm seeing is happening on the Arabic version of Windows. The dialogs both display properly in the English version of Windows. It's in the Arabic version of Windows where the Cancel dialog has garbage text.

-- I don't think the Cancel dialog is actually picking up its message text font from Windows. Because I tried changing the font in the Arabic version of Windows used by message boxes, and when I did that the font on the buttons changes, but the font used for the message text does not.

GS.

MichaelNesmith · Post by **MichaelNesmith** » Fri May 08, 2009 10:02 am

Sorry, I missed the part where it said this was the initial self extract dialog. The good news is, you can indeed edit its font! Just open up dependent.exe in the InstallAware folder in a resource editor and tweak as necessary.

GregS · Post by **GregS** » Fri May 08, 2009 4:49 pm

That worked.

The Cancel message box dialog is not visible in the list of resources, but if you change the font for the progress dialog, the Cancel message box picks up the change. What's interesting about this is that if you change the font and then restore it to Tahoma (the original font) later, the problem doesn't come back - the Cancel message box now displays properly.

Thanks for the help!

GregS · Post by **GregS** » Mon May 11, 2009 11:31 am

I have a followup question about this. We're using InstallAware 8. To me it looks like the behaviour I'm trying to fix is a defect in InstallAware. (The problem, to reiterate, is the garbled text in the Cancel dialog that shows up from InstallAware's progress bar dialog when running in Arabic Windows).

My question is: does anyone know if this behaviour has been fixed in InstallAware 9? How we deal with this problem may depend on the answer to that question.