Cyrillic etc.

simbakirk

New Member
Progress OE10.0B
Unicode GUI, Unicode DB


I have 2 issues which slightly overlap and just wanted to get some thoughts on them.

Our application is rolling out to users who will enter data in Cyrillic. The whole application is Unicode throughout so capturing this is no problem. The interface in terms of labels, shortcuts and accelorator key is all English and uses things like CTRL+S for save, ALT+D for Done.
The problem for the Cyrillic users is that there is no "S" or "D" on the keyboard for them to press - at least not visually, so its quite confusing.

What is a good approach to making shortcuts universal? Use purely function keys? Do mappings for each keyboard layout? Use translation manager (or suchlike) to create a different interface in each user language?

The other issue is about acceptable characters for each language being entered. We want to prevent users entering carriage returns, tabs and other control characters into text fields and also extend this to not letting them enter accented characters that aren't appropriate for the language they're working in.
Restricting by code page doesn't work as we're using UTF-8 and that covers just about everything. So it feels like we need to setup an explicit list of acceptable characters per language. But how can that be efficiently enforced? Running through each data field when its saved and comparing against a list of several hundred characters sounds pretty heavy going.

Any thoughts very welcome.

Just in case you wondered, these problems were seen coming a long time ago but the business decided not to tackle them at that time due to deadlines.

Cheers
Richard
 
Point 1

The translation manager is probably the only sensible way to go. Making accelerator key definitions translatable and labels etc would at least make things consistent. E.g. a button with label &Load would expect ALT+L to choose the button. If the label was changed to &Груз then ALT+Г would be used instead.

The same goes for menu accelerators.

The key using the same character code as L in cyrillic would trigger the button so you could just train the users on which key to use. :lol: But users get confused easily.

Point 2

The method I have most commonly used in the past is to have a conversion table of what to do with reserved characters when using them. E.g. & needs to be converted to & if exported to an XML document.

Good luck.
 

Wogjoift73

New Member
Cyrillic etc

I havent seen an option for cyrillic maybe a customised bit map for messaging or Horners TIU has a facility to import character sets I believe, where do you get the cyrillic character set???
 
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