Re: Hebrew support

Hi Danny, I've added comments prefix with DP:

_____________Original message ____________
Subject: Re: [pgadmin-hackers] Hebrew support
Sender: "Dannyl(at)barak(dot)net(dot)il" <dannyl(at)barak(dot)net(dot)il>
Date: Mon, 18 Feb 2002 18:35:28 +0000

Dave,
Thank you -
fwiw - VB supports hebrew fine.

DP: I probably phrased that badly. What I mean is that the controls that ship with the English vesion of VB doesn't seem to do Unicode well.

There are two issues I believe - 1 for Pgadmin and 1 for PG
1) Input methods - W2K supports input methods in just about every
language known to man. At installation time you choose lang. support
and you're set. This enables you to do a right-alt-shift in W2K and
start typing hebrew in any Windows application. It might be an issue of
which VB objects for input methods you use or how you use them .

DP: I've been very careful in the design of pgAdmin to use only standard VB controls to minimise compatibility problems. Unfortunately they still exist :-( Internationalisation is probably my weakest area. In particular we've had trouble with Japanese....

My own theory is that it's a font problem (I can find no other possibilities) but I can't test this myself as I don't know how, and no-one else seems to be able to tell me. If this is the problem, then we have to find the best way of handling font files that can be 30Mb+

Jean-Michel.. if you are reading, have you had any more thoughts on this? If we knock up a test app, can you test on any of you machines? We could at least then allow the pgAdmin user to select the font, and have them download a suitable one if required.

2) Data encoding - Windows 2K and Office deal with Unicode as UCS-2. PG
encodes with UTF-8. I think what is happening (and mind you I may be
wrong) - is that Pgadmin reads the UTF-8 and being a Windows application
tries to display it in whatever encoding it's objects support. Excel
can READ a PG UTF-8 encoded table but needs to export as a Web page in
UTF-8 to be able to display the hebrew properly.

This is why Pgaccess works ok - it is written in tcl8 and reads UTF-8
from PG and displays the hebrew using it's i18n library.


HAVING said all this - all I really want to do is to get Postgres 7.1 or
7.2 to order hebrew properly in any encoding - which doesnt seem to
work.... -:(

DP: I'd post that problem to the pgsql-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org list.

Regards, Dave