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June 2006 - Posts

Quando Dio vuole castigarci ci manda quello che desideriamo

(I suspect that there will be nothing technical in this post) I am going to ramble a bit so if that sort of thing bothers you then go ahead and skip this post. :-) My Italian is less than perfect, though I believe that the title of this post roughly translates Read More...
Posted Friday, June 30, 2006 10:31 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments
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Working beyond the BMP is going off script (according to GDI)

Yesterday when I was talking about WYSIWYG font dropdowns and using the GetGlyphIndices function to determine if a font supported a character or set of characters, regular reader Mihai mentioned in a comment : GetGlyphIndices does not handle chars outside Read More...
Posted Thursday, June 29, 2006 5:06 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments

WYSIWYG font dropdowns

So, the question that Bill asked was clear: I have a WYSIWYG font dropdown in my toolbar. Some international fonts (like Estrangelo Edessa) show up as squares, apparently because they don’t support all Unicode ranges. I need to detect these fonts and Read More...
Posted Wednesday, June 28, 2006 9:18 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 13 Comments

Every character has a story #21: U+0f77 U+0f79 (TIBETAN VOWEL SIGN VOCALIC [RR|LL])

Peter Constable asked some Unicode folks: I’m just curious to know why 0f77 and 0f79 were given compatibility decompositions rather than canonical decompositions? (I don’t see any obvious reason why canonical decompositions would not have been feasible.) Read More...
Posted Wednesday, June 28, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

MSKLC under Vista (or MSKLC under .NET 2.0)

Earlier today when I talked about Keyboards under LUA , i was very focused on installing the keyboard layouts that MSKLC creates under Vista. And I did talk a bit about what might be a Vista bug. But I didn't talk at all about Microsoft Keyboard Layout Read More...
Posted Tuesday, June 27, 2006 11:02 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 10 Comments
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Keyboards under LUA

People have been noticing that attempting install an MSKLC -generated keyboard layout on Vista has some problems. Say you take your handy dandy custom Bulgarian keyboard created by MSKLC : You try to double click on the Bulg.msi file, and you may or may Read More...
Posted Tuesday, June 27, 2006 9:13 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 10 Comments
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I Tswana know what you're thinking

You know the drill, if you have seen any of these other previous posts: We're drowning in LIPs! Microsoft, you giving us some LIP? Let there be LIPs Oops, we did it again Oh Kannada... (ಕನ್ನಡ) 'c' is for click sounds, and they're good enough for me Persian? Read More...
Posted Tuesday, June 27, 2006 4:03 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 11 Comments

Not all GetUnicodeCategory methods are created equal

So the question that Matt asked was something like this: Why is it that calling GetUnicodeCategory on character '00ad' returns a category of DashPunctuation? I expected the Unicode 4.1 category of Format. Here is the code I used: using System; using System.Text; Read More...
Posted Monday, June 26, 2006 7:40 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments

Access object name limits

A few days ago, Eric Rucker posted about the various limits in Access 2007 in this post , including my favorites: Number of characters in a table name 64 Number of characters in a field name 64 Number of characters in a text field 255 Number of characters Read More...
Posted Sunday, June 25, 2006 1:11 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments

About the Fonts folder in Windows, Part 1 (aka What are we talking about?)

When I first mentioned yesterday that I was going to be blathering about the Fonts folder for a bit, regular reader Rosyna commented : It'll be interesting. I know virtually nothing about the Windows fonts folder. Many people hate the Mac OS X's multiple Read More...
Posted Sunday, June 25, 2006 10:32 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 23 Comments

Newcomer's Locale Explorer beta

Eric Sassaman (the MVP lead who has helped to keep me and my team involved whenever the MVP Summit has been happening at Microsoft) sent me some mail the other day about a cool project (currently in beta) that Dr. Joseph M. Newcomer put up on his website. Read More...
Posted Sunday, June 25, 2006 8:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

About the font folder

I've been wanting to do a post about the font folder for a while now, and Simon Daniels has given me some additional ideas that will stretch that into two or maybe three posts. Just thought I'd give you all a heads up on what I was going to be posting Read More...
Posted Saturday, June 24, 2006 4:50 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments
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Do they grow beets in Luxembourg?

Well even if they have to go across the border to find people who grow beets, they do have LIPs now.... :-) Previous posts in the series: We're drowning in LIPs! Microsoft, you giving us some LIP? Let there be LIPs Oops, we did it again Oh Kannada... Read More...
Posted Friday, June 23, 2006 1:53 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 13 Comments

Leg godt with the Lego!

It was a very sad thing when Mike forwarded me the link the other day -- Lego to lay off 1,200, end U.S. production Though Conan O'Brien had an amusing take on it tonight, pointing out that perhaps they would not be shutting down the US plant in Enfield, Read More...
Posted Friday, June 23, 2006 12:59 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

Getting the length in bytes

Overheard in microsoft.public.win32.programmer.inernational: Hi Guys, Sorry for posting this. I have gone through lots of postings here and unable to get an answer. Here is my problem. I am using Windows XP Pro English. I have a VB dll that passes strings Read More...
Posted Thursday, June 22, 2006 11:35 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

Things I [don't] like about blogging

There are many things I like about blogging. There are bugs that have been found specifically through the research I would do for entries ( like this one ), bugs other people have reported here ( like this one ), and bugs that people mentioned here that Read More...
Posted Thursday, June 22, 2006 5:03 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments
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Quechua me if you can!

Here we go again! In the fine spirit of previous posts such as We're drowning in LIPs! , Microsoft, you giving us some LIP? , Let there be LIPs , Oops, we did it again , Oh Kannada... (ಕನ್ನಡ) , 'c' is for click sounds, and they're good enough for me , Read More...
Posted Thursday, June 22, 2006 12:36 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 16 Comments

Is it on the list?

When you look at Win32 API functions like by GetLocaleInfo / SetLocaleInfo , you will notice that only have a setting for LOCALE_SLONGDATE and not for the big list of suggested possible long date values that shows up in Regional and Language Options (RLO). Read More...
Posted Wednesday, June 21, 2006 2:08 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

Give me a break [Char] !

Over on the Shell team, Jeff Miller is one of those very cool developers who knows how to get stuff done. And I am not just saying that because he let me fix a bug in the Shell's code ( this bug , in fact 1 ). Anyway, he sent email to one of the internal Read More...
Posted Wednesday, June 21, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments

Maybe it is time to sell the convertible

I admit that it is a lot of different factors just kind of converging, but I realized today as I was scooting to work that the weather which used to inspire me to want to drive the Saab around is now the weather that I'd rather be scooting in. So combine Read More...
Posted Tuesday, June 20, 2006 8:08 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

Correct? Intuitive? Both? Neither?

It was way back in April of 2005 (in the post Is Whidbey's international support finished? ) that I pointed out how it would be possible in future versions for the .NET Framework to properly support parsing/formatting of digits used by other locales now Read More...
Posted Monday, June 19, 2006 6:21 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

The Phantom of the Digits

If you are a regular reader of this blog you probably know about how I can't seem to stop bringing up digit substitution . There is, however, something I forgot to mention about it. So I will take advantage of the dynamic nature of blogs and bring it Read More...
Posted Sunday, June 18, 2006 11:25 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments

Feature ideas don't always turn out to be good ones

One of the occupational hazards of having the job I do and also having 'notions of linguistic aptitude' is that sometimes an idea might occur to me that initially seems interesting but after a whole bunch of research it turns out that it wasn't really Read More...
Posted Sunday, June 18, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

On the first day of Microsoft

No, I am not going to burst into song here -- that takes at a minimum a great deal of alcohol. :-) I am also not going to write about Bill Gates and the early days of the company that was once known as Micro-Soft. :-) I am going to talk about some confusion Read More...
Posted Saturday, June 17, 2006 12:11 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

64-bit thoughts, and an apology

64-bit is becoming more and more popular. This I know because not a week goes by that I do not get either an email or a contact link request for information about when the 64-bit version of MSKLC will be available, despite the fact that there are four Read More...
Posted Saturday, June 17, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments

Microsoft *does* support OpenType!

The other day, Ruben suggested in two comments to an unrelated post that Microsoft does not support OpenType (you can jump to those comments for the exact reasoning behind his opinion). The bit of the mini-rant from Ruben about Microsoft intentionally Read More...
Posted Friday, June 16, 2006 2:01 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 14 Comments

Neither GDI nor Uniscribe solve the ultimate font problem completely, either

I have not been shy about criticizing stuff provided by the Windows Shell in the past , but it is not entirely fair to put the burden of logical fonts upon them like I did in this post and this one a few days ago. I mean, stuff like DEFAULT_GUI_FONT actually Read More...
Posted Friday, June 16, 2006 7:35 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

Hindu != Hindi

It's a subtle point, but one would have to be foolish to miss it.... (cf: Raymond's post It's a good idea to get somebody who knows the language to be your proofreader ) Read More...
Posted Thursday, June 15, 2006 1:34 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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Behind 'How to break Windows Notepad'

Larry Osterman pointed me at an article entitled How to break Windows Notepad that makes for an interesting experiment: Here's how to do it: 1. Open up Notepad (not Wordpad, not Word or any other word processor ) 2. Type in this sentence exactly (without Read More...
Posted Wednesday, June 14, 2006 8:47 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 52 Comments

Size matters (when it comes to day names, at least)

It was many months ago that I asked Does size matter? And if so, how do you measure it? Funny how preoccupied everyone seems to be with size, all around the world. Anyway, in the NLS API, the GetLocaleInfo function's LCTYPEs include: LOCALE_SDAYNAME1 Read More...
Posted Tuesday, June 13, 2006 11:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 11 Comments

66 Percent

(absolutely nothing technical in this post, whatsoever!) My Left Ventricular Ejection Fraction ( LVEF ) is still about the same, which means my heart is still in the right place. :-) Anyway, this means that soon I'll be ready for more Novantrone -- infusion Read More...
Posted Tuesday, June 13, 2006 10:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments
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Uniscribe from Visual Basic

Over the past six weeks I have received eight different requests for information on how to get various bits of Uniscribe to work from Visual Basic, in VB5 or VB6. Although there is sample code to do this in my book , the book is out of print now (even Read More...
Posted Monday, June 12, 2006 3:15 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 10 Comments

More problems with the Shell's 'ultimate font' solutions

Yesterday when I posted Why the Windows Shell can't provide the ultimate font solution for everyone (or even anyone!) , I pointed out how the specific mission that the Shell has had in font solutions would, in most cases not be an adequate solution for Read More...
Posted Monday, June 12, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

Online persona and navel gazing

Years ago, I had a friend who later admitted they first 'met' me in the virtual world (at that point it was CompuServe forums), and their initial interest was to meet the person behind the online persona I had -- to see if I was actually that person. Read More...
Posted Sunday, June 11, 2006 11:51 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments
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Death of a Data Access Page Wizard

After Clint posted Death of an old friend -- Data Access Pages , I do not feel quite as guilty that I have not really done anything with the TSI Form/Report to Data Access Page Wizard since Access 2002 (I have been told it mostly works in Access 2003 Read More...
Posted Sunday, June 11, 2006 11:58 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

Why the Windows Shell can't provide the ultimate font solution for everyone (or even anyone!)

A few days ago when I put up the post Is this the Über-font post? No, but it is the teaser for it! , I did sort of promise that I'd deliver on a post explaining about the issues related to fonts on Windows that plague so many application developers, whether Read More...
Posted Sunday, June 11, 2006 2:45 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 18 Comments

Cut off from society?

(Nothing technical in this post; it's a private service announcement from Trigeminal Software!) Sometime in the early morning this last Tuesday, the Internet Service Provider that hosts my virtual domains upgraded their spam filter. This is good as far Read More...
Posted Saturday, June 10, 2006 11:14 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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Is the SendKeys juice worth the squeeze?

There was a funny scene in Superman II where after a ton of oranges Lois Lane has just a tiny bit of actual Orange Juice. And that was even with someone like Superman wielding the juicer. The truth is that the juice is not always worth the squeeze.... Read More...
Posted Saturday, June 10, 2006 5:35 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 20 Comments

DEP is not affected by locale settings

When I hear someone has a problem involving VB5/VB6 and strings that involves language issues, I can usually make a good guess at what is going wrong.... So the other day, when Christopher used the contact link to ask me a question, I had a notion of Read More...
Posted Thursday, June 08, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments

Reading the boilerplate

How often do we actually read the boilerplate text? It is funny, I was thinking about this the other day. I have belonged to Linguist List for a little while now, though quite definitely as a lurker (even if I can upgrade myself from delusions of linguistic Read More...
Posted Thursday, June 08, 2006 12:00 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments

Yi Syllables are totally Radical, dude!

(This is also not the font post; just hang in there, it will be here soon!) Yi is one of the minority languages of China. The Liangshan Yi script was devised in the mid 70's and the standard was pushed out to the world in 1980 (a fuller description of Read More...
Posted Wednesday, June 07, 2006 10:14 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments

Performance issues with language specific sorts?

(No, this is not the font post!) Bryan Murtha asks: I've read your blog and I was hoping to get out of it, just how do you setup an internationalized SQL Server database. I read all the docs and the International Software book from Microsoft. Ok, use Read More...
Posted Wednesday, June 07, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

Is this the Über-font post? No, but it is the teaser for it!

What do this question from flyingxu: I'm an MFC programmer. When I try to write some app for Chinese or Korean, I find many controls' size are changed by theire font. I mean, when I change the font, child dialog's size change and the whole dialog's layout Read More...
Posted Tuesday, June 06, 2006 2:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments

Unicode and SQL Collations have nothing to do with each other

It was just a few days ago when I was channeling comedies of my youth in the post Je, for sure, from Sweden . And in that post, I responded to Alexey Sadomov's query about unusual behavior in the SQL_SwedishStd_Pref_CP1_CI_AS SQL Server compatibility Read More...
Posted Tuesday, June 06, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments

Is SQL Server really supporting UTF-16?

DanS12345 asked via 'Suggest a topic' the following question: The documentation for SQL Server 2005 says that xml is stored in UTF-16 encoding. In fact the doc's make a point that xml is stored differently than NCHARs, which use UCS-2. This does not seem Read More...
Posted Monday, June 05, 2006 6:54 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

More on case insensitivity and its intuitivality

Yesterday in ' Intuitivosity (intuitivality?) of case insensitivity ' I talked a little a bit about some of the limitations in the Mac OS-X implementation of case insensitivity. I realized I needed to actually point out a little more information here Read More...
Posted Monday, June 05, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 11 Comments

Intuitivosity (intuitivality?) of case insensitivity

Over on Language Log, Geoffrey K. Pullum notes in ASCII, Mac OS-X, and the 128 names of DormAid an issue that folks running on Windows have a very good understanding of -- a case insensitive file system in the sense of identification and validation that Read More...
Posted Sunday, June 04, 2006 8:52 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 16 Comments

What's the encoding, again?

Regular reader Maurits sent me in email something he noticed the other day: Notice on this page http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/intl/nls_Collation.asp that the characters in parentheses are being mis-displayed as windows-1252 Read More...
Posted Sunday, June 04, 2006 8:13 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments

Developers vs. Users?

A little bit about the backstory on some of the Important changes in NLS that span Windows and the .NET Framework .... The language list in IE has its behavior firmly embedded in the HTTP "accept language" standard that is so firmly entrenched in the Read More...
Posted Sunday, June 04, 2006 7:28 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

Important changes in NLS that span Windows and the .NET Framework

If you follow Shawn Steele's blog you will have seen these already, but if you don't and you care about globalization support in Windows or the .Net Framework you will want to take a look: Internet Explorer has more explicit language names in Windows Read More...
Posted Sunday, June 04, 2006 6:23 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

What the @!#$% is the TERTIARY_WEIGHTS() function for?

This function TERTIARY_WEIGHTS () has been in Microsoft SQL Server for a while. Now you have perhaps read what I have had to say about tertiary weights previously in posts like this one or this one or this one (the latter is especially topical to some Read More...
Posted Friday, June 02, 2006 8:31 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments

Je, for sure, from Sweden.

(Apologies for the title; despite the fact that I am not nearly as attractive, there are times I cannot avoid channeling my inner Jamie Lee Curtis!) Alexey Sadomov asked me (via the contact link): Hi, Michael. I've encountered with a problem in sql server Read More...
Posted Friday, June 02, 2006 7:33 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments

It is only of SECONDARY importance

Since the time I posted Why do we call w 'double u' -- doesn't it look more like a 'double v'? , I have had several people ask me about what is difference between v and w in Swedish/Finnish, or more specifically about how Microsoft implements it. Now Read More...
Posted Friday, June 02, 2006 6:44 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments

Presentation forms in Microsoft keyboards?

Jason Kane asked in the Suggestion Box: Hello, I'd like to know a bit of background on the reasons taken to deviate from keyboard standards in the Microsoft layouts. For instance the Arabic Yeh with Hamza would be Unicode 0626 in the new Pashto (Afghanistan) Read More...
Posted Thursday, June 01, 2006 6:10 PM by Michael S. Kaplan