Dual Language support for existing software

[daniel_bingamon]

I have some software that we developed under Pelles over several years.   (Currently in English)  Now we have a request to put screen in Portuguese.   So, created a second .RC file that has same names as the English Dialogs and Menus only with the _PT added to the name.   Then when the alternate language (Portuguese) is selected the _PT will be added to the name and select the alternate Dialogs and Menus.
This is working so far - I've tested the menus, however the Accent Marks are producing multiple strange characters.   What can I do about this?

[John Z]

Hi Daniel,

How have you encoded the characters in the resource file?  I believe that they must be as wide characters to display correctly in windows controls and menus.  If they are multibyte encodings you will need to convert them into  Unicode.  I have a multi language program and the accent marks I've used for French, Spanish and Russian seem ok.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/intl/translation-between-string-types  might be of help.

John Z

Also you might post examples,or screen captures, of correct and incorrect strings with various accent marks.

If you'd like to tell me the English word or few adjacent words that have the issue, I can convert to Portuguese and try them in my multilingual program to see if the same accent issue happens.
 
You might also check out https://sourceforge.net/projects/convolution-filter-editor/ by Pelles forum member Grincheux written using Pelles and supports French, English, German, Italian and Spanish.  The sources are available on sourceforge too as a 7z file.

[daniel_bingamon]

Hello John,
Management won't let me post any code that will go in the machine software.  They have opted on non accented controls.
So, this sort of resolved - if you want call it that.  Not the ideal way.

[John Z]

Hi Daniel,

Thanks for the update.  I wouldn't think of a single Menu label as code, but I do understand.

From and older posting:

Good news: it wasn't too hard adding a new compiler option (/utf-8) that switches from the default ANSI code page (both for runtime, and source files without a BOM). Will be in the next version.

You mentioned the original sources were from possibly older versions of Pelles so
you might try adding /utf-8 switch to the compile options - possibly could help.


John Z