Foreign Languages in Labview

[uanant]

hi Pavitra,
Did you get this problem addressed. I am having same problem with Indian language.
I want to create front panel in Hindi and populate my array with Hindi font but did not work, all i see is ?????
I would appreciate if you tell me how did you address this issue.
regards
Anant

[CarlaU]

Hi Anant,

Unfortunately, LabVIEW only offers a few different language versions:  English, French, German, Japanese, Korean and Chinese (simplified). However, you do not need to have a specific language version of LabVIEW, such as French, German, or Japanese, to be able to enter display text in that language. LabVIEW supports single and double byte characters, but it does not support bidirectional scripts (such as Arabic or Hebrew).

If you want to display text in multi-byte character sets (such as Japanese, Chinese, or Korean) in LabVIEW, you only need an operating system of the appropriate language or an MBCS-enabled operating system with an Input Method Editor (IME) for the corresponding language. Also, there are several commercially available language kits that you can add on to the operating system. There is a great knowledge-based article that I found in the NI Developer Zone that discusses localizing your LabVIEW application to different languages.

What I think may be happening is that the string array with the Hindi characters is not being recognized by LabVIEW so it is just returning a question mark since it does not know what to do with it. I hope this helps!

Carla

[tst]

You should also note that if you copied the text from an external source (e.g. notepad), it will not work if the text is in Unicode. What happened to the Unicode support which Greg promised "soon"?

In any case, LabVIEW does support Hebrew and Arabic, but only if you have them as part of the upper bit of the active ASCII code page. I do Hebrew all the time, but it's quite a tricky business if you have to incorporate anything which isn't Hebrew letters (numbers, periods, hypens, commas, question marks, English letters, etc.). Microsoft have spent a lot of time and money getting it to work relatively smoothly in Office and I wouldn't mind personally if NI built on that experience in LabVIEW in the same way that Open Office has.

[michhoefer]

Hi Pavitra Hi Anant,

you can display asian language in labview for the linux operating system. You must set the LANG Enviroment to zh_CN and also set the LC_ALL to zh_CN. Then start labview.
In the labvew enviroment you must use the right chinese font for example "founder-fangsong". Please remember you cannot use a unicode font in labview.

I hope this can help you.

michhoefer

[michhoefer]

Sorry the console.jpg was wrong.

[BartSchroder]

We are also trying to localize our application. Our goal is to have a language file containing 6 languages (including Korean and Chinese), in unicode, and then to change the menus and tooltips to the target languages. By just changing these we will not have the spacing problems that are easy to forsee if we change the control names.

We can see how to read in the unicode, and how to convert it from unicode to multibyte. But we cannot see how to display it. Neither tooltips, nor the menu items seem to accept the multi-byte. Standard programs like notepad and word render the unicode characters correctly.

The post above suggests that only by having the operating system locale set to the appropriate country will the correct character set be displayed correctly. This makes it almost impossible for us to test, as we can not then interract with the PC, because we no not understand it. It also seems a poor excuse. Surely this must be a problem affecting thousands of LAbview developers making applications to be used in several countries. Any suggestions welcome!

[tst]

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BartSchroder wrote:

The post above suggests that only by having the operating system locale set to the appropriate country will the correct character set be displayed correctly.

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Sorry, that's not what I meant. LabVIEW will NOT display Unicode characters in any case. I was refering to ASCII - the upper 128 characters of ASCII are not constant and can be replaced using code pages - in my computer, LabVIEW uses code page 1255, where the Hebrew letters start at 224, but there are other Hebrew code pages as well. The exact values vary between languages (and Chinese and Korean might not even have this).

[BartSchroder]

What we found is that in 8.5, if you have the string 'UseUnicode=TRUE' in the Labview.ini file Labview will display unicode text in a text control. This is useful. However, it will not display unicode in either the Menu items, or in Tool Tips. This is a significant problem for us. Any thoughts?

[tst]

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BartSchroder wrote:

if you have the string 'UseUnicode=TRUE' in the Labview.ini file Labview will display unicode text in a text control.

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Nice. I don't remember seeing that the last time I looked through the various INI keys lists, but I wasn't looking specifically for Unicode.

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Any thoughts?

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Nothing more productive than suggesting that you implement your own. If you search both here and in the LAVA forums, you can find implementations for context menus, both native and based on the Windows API. You can modify those to work as menus, but obviously, it's nowhere near as convenient as using the built-in version. Sorry, I just don't have experience with this.

[Odd_Modem]

This INI key does work to a certain extent.

It works on string constants on the block diagram and on string controls and indicators.

The context menu for the string has an option to force unicode text. It appears that this
must be set before you wire to the terminal and you cannot toggle this setting back and
forth and have the expected behavior follow, after it has been wired.

The attachment shows some Cyrillic text, which obviously is not on codepage 1252,
on the block diagram and on the front panel, with some other indicators that did not
have the force unicode option set, or the option was toggled after it was wired to.



This is a nice step forward for LabVIEW.