You're right that it is no picnic. I got my app running fairly quickly using INTL Toolkit, but there were a few headaches for sure. I am setting the COLLATE during reindexing and crossing my fingers. Our Japanese beta sites will presumably let me know if anything is badly in need of work.

The hardest problems though, turned out to be COM communication with the VB and C++ components in our application. They really broke under Japanese Windows. Where I can simply manipulate strings under American or Japanese Windows, they, VB in particular, go bananas. Suddenly their string functions turn every thing to garbage. We were passing BSTR's across the COM boundry and VB and C++ broke. A BSTR passed to VFP worked fine. I couldn't gloat too long however, since I immediatly ran into VFP's poor safearray handling capabilities, but we got it working by passing arrays of VT_ARRAY|VT_VARIANT's instead of VT_UI1's.

Lordy, I hope Korean and Chinese aren't this hard!

Gary


>I've just finished writing a Japanese application in FoxPro. It can be done but there are a lot of problems, pitfalls, and limitations.
>Sort order, fonts, unicode, IME Editor, etc. Sort order is definetly the most difficult. FoxPro doesn't sort the Japanese language the way Japanese people do and Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji most be intermixed in order for it to be useful.
>The fonts are just flat out odd (characters will appear on the screen turned 90 degrees with some fonts). Even something as simple as reading e-mails from Japan becomes a chore due to the limited character set of most e-mail programs.
>If you need a lot of info, e-mail me (twenger@thomcomp.com).
>
>* WARNING: Writing applications in Japanese has been known headaches, sleeplessness, and stomache irritations in test subjects and can be hazardous to your health and mental well being.
>
>Tom