Ben (or Chet?),
I've re-written my entire application so that all the forms, reports and data entry display in Japanese, as well as English (the user has the abililty to switch between languages). The first trick is to make sure that some double byte charater sets (DBCS) font is installed on your machine as well as any machine of your client(s). The particular font that I use is the Arial Unicode (this is a huge font file, 20+ MB, that contains basically all the characters of all the major languages in the world). The Japanese characters, both Katakana and Kanji, require DBCS. Since the standard Arial font is a single byte set it can't handle these more sophisticated characters.

Secondly, I had to change the font for the captions of all the graphical controls from Arial to Arial Unicode. Thirdly, (and this may be the show stopper) you need to have an OS that can handle DBCS. I know that Windows 2000 and XP are capable, but I've found that Win 9x/ME are not up to the task. To properly display the Japanese characters on the forms you need to either be running Window in Japanese as the default language (at least that's the only way it works for me running Windows 2000).

To get both languages integrated into the same app, I had to remove the English hard-coded characters of the text labels used for the forms and reports, and move the text into into data tables. This was my solution, though I'd imagine there's several ways to accomplish this issue.

I could go on about this, but I don't know if I'm answering your specific questions. But the good news is that I was able to have both language capabilities in the same application.

Let me know if this helps.

- Dave Lauben


>...I really think so! (Sorry, I couldn't resist)
>
>We have a client who wants to use an existing VFP app, but wants to enter and store all data as Japanese characters. I'm clear on how to set up Windows to enter Japanese characters in Foxpro tables with the correct character set and font.
>
>However, all of the data entry controls in the app's forms have Arial as the font for all data entry controls, which I know doesn't contain Japanese characters.
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>I need to know if there's any quick way to get this app to store and echo back Japanese characters in the forms and tables without having to change the font on all of the data entry controls.
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>One idea that I had was to rename a font file that contains Japanese characters to ARIAL.TTF and try to fool Windows into thinking it was the Arial font that my forms are already using. Has anyone tried this?
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>Any and all suggestions that wouldn't involve changing (and therefore creating different versions of) my application would be appreciated.
>
>Thanks,
>
>Ben Holton
>Conarc, Inc.