CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c++visual-c++visual-c++-6
Luke Stubbs
Luke Stubbs

Reputation: 21

Supporting Unicode-only languages in Visual C++ 6.0 (preferably without using Unicode!)

We need to decide whether and how we can support the Georgian language in a large, legacy Visual C++ 6.0 application.

We already support the major east European languages through setting the codepage. Georgian though has no codepage and as far as I can tell it is supported only through Unicode. Much of our code implicitly assumes one byte per character, so really we’re looking for a workaround to represent the language in 8 bit character.

As far as VC++ 6.0 goes, my understanding is that it supports Unicode, but that the dialog and resource files are 8-bit text files and they do not.

So is all of this right and if so, is there any hack to solve our problem?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 709

Answers (1)

hippietrail
hippietrail

Reputation: 17013

There is no codepage for Georgian. There are some ad-hoc encodings that map Georgian glyphs onto the Latin range for use with certain pre-Unicode fonts, but of course then you couldn't use English and Georgian together with a single font.

If you really can't support Unicode your best option for a hack would be to invent your own 8-bit encoding. Of course then you won't have a font that will display it so you'll have to either use it without being able to see it, add some conversions to support Unicode fonts anyway, or make your own custom font for your custom encoding.

Update:

If you are really lucky you might be able to find a suitable font that's designed as "extended ASCII" with the Georgian alphabet characters in the higher 128 fields where accented characters would be in Latin-1 for instance. If the Georgian characters occupy the lower 128 characters, overwriting the Latin / ASCII / English characters then this is not "extended ASCII" and would be less useful.

I do not know if such a font exists.

Upvotes: 1

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