Steve,

when I started with my multi-language application I had no no idea how Windows handled it. We started with 11 European languages and that was no problem for Foxpro2.6 for Windows (yes...the good old days).

Having migrated some of the applications over to VFP people started to ask for other languages (Czech, Polish, etc). Going through a rough time and several questions toward Microsoft they said it couldn't be done. If you were using for instance the Polish keyboard layout you couldn't put any Polish characters in any VFP control.
The unforunate thing at that time was that we were looking so hard for a solution (even experienced VFP people said it couldn't be done) that we did not look into the VFP examples. At one time when we almost gave up, we went back to MSDN and the VFP expamples we found the RTF-example. Had we found this in the beginning we could have saved our selves a lot of work and frustration.
With this control we were now able to enter RTF data and to store it in a memo field. This was part one.

The second part was a little bit more tricky. The applications I built uses phrases that are coded. These codes are matched to a phrase table (per language) and that all the phrases are sticked to each other.
A coded field may therefor contain: #EXTI0001, #EXTI0004 #MLAY010000 etc. These codes are processed and translated. This all worked fine for the European languages. We were also looking into MS-Word as a reporting tool back than. Beside the fact that Word was slow it all worked pretty well. When the RTF-data came into effect Word started giving us some headache. In order to avoid these problems and to solve the speed issue we decided to break the link with Word and to move over to a new print engine. I saw an add in the FoxAdvisor for the Virtual Print Engine from IdealSoftware. We tested it and are now very happy with the results. It is capable and extremely fast. To give you some indication: the report generation of a document in Word took two minutes. we can now do the same report in 10 seconds with VPE. Customer love it.

All in all: after some hard times we have finally all things on the road. RTF input is a no problem, neither is printing. As is usually true. All beginning is hard, so was this.

Regards,

Ron Brahma