>Hi All
>
>I have a customer who operates a VFP System using English, but wants to be able to print letters and forms using the Japanese character set.
>
>Does anyone have any experience of this?

Kevin,

I do this all the time. I have written applications that need to support multi-languages including Simple Chinese, Complex Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Czech, Polish, Dutch etc.

What you need to do first is to think outside the box:
- use the RTF-control to enter data (do not use standard VFP controls)
- use the proper keyboard settings to enter data in the proper language
- use a specific print engine to print RTF. Forget Word, I had a very close look into it and it just doesn't cut it. I now use Virtual Print Engine from www.idealsoftware.com and to my knowledge it's the only tool that can deal with streaming RTF. In other words: if you send it Polish-RTF and Czech-RTF in a table is will show them both perfectly.

For entering the Chinese/Japanese/Korean data we made the mistake that we use Twinbridge. Allthough entering and printing is not a problem we do have a problem that we can't print both Chinese and Japanese on one document. We will start moving these languages towards RTF but the print-engine has some problems with printing it. It prints it fine with TwinBridge but the RTF-equivalent is still a problem.

Be aware that it is not an easy task. Even Microsoft can't supply you with all relevant data. You need a specific version of th RTF-control because otherwise you will not be able to enter Chinese, you need to install multi-language support, you need to tell MS-Office (?) that Chinese/Japanese/Korean must be supported, etc. Trust me, it took great pain and effort to be where we are now.

I would gladly share this with you...if you still want me ;-)

Regards,

Ron Brahma