I generally translate my apps to German, French, Spanish and Italian which seems to be going ok. Are there additional complications in trying to localise for Chinese?
I tried just adding a simplified Chinese constant but nothing shows up. Do I need a special font?
You’ll need to ensure that the language support is installed for your given operating system. On Mac go to the Language and Region system preference and add Chinese.
There are also some tricks to do with entry of text in the native language. Generally if you are using built in control you should be fine.
On Windows it’s something similar.
Thanks Ian, will do.
The only issue I came across was with a custom control I built. That control was a data grid. When the user started typing I displayed an edit field and allowed entry to continue. That caused problems with the international language entry system. The first letters typed are often only part of the first characters. I got around this by using an API to:
- Detect the current keyboard event
- Show the control and give it focus
- Repost the event into the system
Which allowed the entry to work perfectly. My code for this in somewhere on the forum, but is for Mac only. I’m sure something similar is possible for other platforms. As I said you don’t need to bother for built in controls that are always visible.
It’s also worth enabling Pinyin keyboard, which works with the western keyboards. It allows you to test everything will work.
Obviously your data storage method need to work with an international friendly encoding. I’ve stuck to UTF8, which is nice an easy.
1 Like
Awesome info thanks Ian