Re: Hebrew support

Hi Danny, I've added comments prefix with DP:

_____________Original message ____________
Subject:    Re: [pgadmin-hackers] Hebrew support
Sender:    "Dannyl@barak.net.il" <dannyl@barak.net.il>
Date:        Mon, 18 Feb 2002 18:35:28 +0000

Dave,
Thank you -
fwiw - VB supports hebrew fine.



DP: I probably phrased that badly. What I mean is that the controls that ship with the English vesion of VB doesn't
seemto do Unicode well. 

There are two issues I believe - 1 for Pgadmin and 1 for PG
1) Input methods - W2K supports input methods in just about every
language known to man.  At installation time you choose lang. support
and you're set. This enables you to do a right-alt-shift in W2K and
start typing hebrew in any Windows application. It might be an issue of
which VB objects for input methods you use or how you use them .



DP: I've been very careful in the design of pgAdmin to use only standard VB controls to minimise compatibility
problems.Unfortunately they still exist :-( Internationalisation is probably my weakest area. In particular we've had
troublewith Japanese.... 

My own theory is that it's a font problem (I can find no other possibilities) but I can't test this myself as I don't
knowhow, and no-one else seems to be able to tell me.  If this is the problem, then we have to find the best way of
handlingfont files that can be 30Mb+ 

Jean-Michel.. if you are reading, have you had any more thoughts on this? If we knock up a test app, can you test on
anyof you machines? We could at least then allow the pgAdmin user to select the font, and have them download a suitable
oneif required.  


2) Data encoding  - Windows 2K and Office deal with Unicode as UCS-2. PG
encodes with UTF-8.  I think what is happening (and mind you I may be
wrong) - is that Pgadmin reads the UTF-8 and being a Windows application
tries to display it in whatever encoding it's objects support.  Excel
can READ a PG UTF-8 encoded table but needs to export as a Web page in
UTF-8 to be able to display the hebrew properly.

This is why Pgaccess works ok - it is written in tcl8 and reads UTF-8
from PG and displays the hebrew using it's i18n library.


HAVING said all this - all I really want to do is to get Postgres 7.1 or
7.2 to order hebrew properly in any encoding - which doesnt seem to
work.... -:(



DP: I'd post that problem to the pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org list.

Regards, Dave