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March 2007 - Posts

Rotate it when vertical?

It was quite a while ago that I first posted Let's get vertical and talked about how prepending a font name with an @ would signal a font with knowledge of verticality to properly decide when to rotate glyphs 90 degrees. I have been asked whether those Read More...
Posted Saturday, March 31, 2007 7:17 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments

If you think speaking with an accent is a challenge, try doing it over a wire service....

It would seem that the AP is able to make typographical errors, in addition to their more conceptual ones. The Associated Press-inspired problem was ironically enough reported over the AP wire: Newspapers struggle with name accents By LAURA WIDES-MUNOZ Read More...
Posted Saturday, March 31, 2007 3:43 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments

There are no words

Hmmm...... Cake text printer doesn't speak Italian, pens errors instead I guess I can't say this one takes the cake. Technically, I can't even say no comment given the fact that the extraneous text is actually a bunch of comments! I feel like Alan Smithee Read More...
Posted Saturday, March 31, 2007 1:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments
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Determining if a font is gonna get it done

Stuart asks: I don't really know who else to ask this question so I'm hoping you know the answer or could find an answer for it. Uniscribe docs are somewhat lacking :( We (Mozilla/Firefox) are using Uniscribe for text rendering now and everything works Read More...
Posted Friday, March 30, 2007 8:59 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments

When a font looks like crap....

Ravi asks: Hello Michael, I am a regular reader of your blog and I find it very entertaining and informative. My problem is this: Gautami font in XP and Vista is absolute crap for reading Telugu documents on the web. You previously had a post comparing Read More...
Posted Friday, March 30, 2007 11:50 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 7 Comments
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Why does it use strings to represent numbers, exactly?

Aaron asks: Hello! I've got a question that's been nagging at me for a while now. I work for a dev tools company and design a fair number of public APIs. So I tend to be critical of other companies public APIs and usually wonder "what made them decide Read More...
Posted Thursday, March 29, 2007 11:21 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments

I Kana understand you, could you repeater that? (Part 1)

I have made bad puns in the titles of blog posts talking about Kana previously (e.g. Knock knock! Who's there? Kana! Kana Who? ). Now, in a bold bit of irony, I am going to repeat that experience here and talk about the repeater. Somewhat repeatedly in Read More...
Posted Thursday, March 29, 2007 1:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments

Like Cartman, that 'W' letter isn't fat; it's big boned!

Eli's question was simple enough: Is there a way to tell if a System.Drawing.Font object that I’ve created is fixed width or not? Also, once I know whether or not my font is fixed width, is there a way to tell what the width is? The only approach I could Read More...
Posted Wednesday, March 28, 2007 8:36 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments

A yen for Yen may be left unsatiated

(No, this post is not about anything kinky) If you are a regular reader then you know that I have been talking about the Yen ( U+00a5 ) for a long time . Now I fully understand why Microsoft went down the road of having U+005c (REVERSE SOLIDUS) look like Read More...
Posted Wednesday, March 28, 2007 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 7 Comments

GPOS w/o GSUB in a TTF on XP SP2 can be FUBAR

(This post might win an award for strangest title, unless you deal with OpenType!) The GetCharacterPlacement function in GDI has been around since Windows 95/NT 4.0, and the truth is that the number of people who use it probably outnumber the number of Read More...
Posted Tuesday, March 27, 2007 5:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

Another post about providing font samples

Mandi asks: I pray to God you read this email. I cannot find a way to print out a sample of all of vista's font on my new HP computer that came with Vista pre installed. I know for windows xp was hard. If there is some way can you please forward it on Read More...
Posted Tuesday, March 27, 2007 5:11 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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Error message of the week, for me

This is truly the error message of the week.... I could also just stop messing with servers before I try to log into them, but what fun would that be? :-) This post brought to you by 0 ( U+0030 , a.k.a. DIGIT ZERO) Read More...
Posted Tuesday, March 27, 2007 5:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments
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Hello, Mr. TrueType Font. Do you support Bengali?

Torifat asks: Hi Michael, I'm a vb programmer (You can assume me as a neophyte user :)). I want to get the name of those fonts, whose glyphs contain Bengali characters... I've tried some codes [IMLangFontLink::GetFontCodePages and ...] from your blog Read More...
Posted Monday, March 26, 2007 8:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments

Flirting with a strange keyboard, will you remember its language in the morning?

If you use the GetKeyNameText function, you can get the name of a key -- like the name that you might want to put on a soft keyboard (assuming you did not want to change what was on the key when you changed shift states or something -- the static nature Read More...
Posted Monday, March 26, 2007 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

Somebody turned 50 this weekend!

Yes, it is true that Cathy and Julie both turned 40 this year . But it turns out that in the opinion of more than just a few people , the European Union just turned 50! Now it is the case that some purists like to go all the way back to the Treaty of Read More...
Posted Sunday, March 25, 2007 6:50 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 7 Comments

What's the problem with MapVirtualKey[Ex], on CE and otherwise?

Also over in the microsoft.public.win32.programmer.international newsgroup, Norman Diamond (who is clearly doing a lot of stuff with CE these days!) asked: In Windows Mobile 5 (Windows CE 5), when calling MapVirtualKey with the second parameter set to Read More...
Posted Sunday, March 25, 2007 4:32 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments

Will the real Unicode character message please stand up?

Over in the microsoft.public.win32.programmer.international newsgroup, Norman Diamond asks: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms646288.aspx * The WM_UNICHAR message is equivalent to WM_CHAR, but it uses Unicode * Transformation Format (UTF)-32, Read More...
Posted Sunday, March 25, 2007 12:05 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

It was déjà vu all over again, this time in quite an oymoronic way

It was just the other day that I got the message via the contact link: Michael, Hi. I'm a Neurologist in Dallas, TX, and a computer person. My Internet Explorer 6 (running on Win98) suddenly started using a strange font where the html page coding was Read More...
Posted Saturday, March 24, 2007 3:08 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

It was déjà vu, man. Pure déjà vu....

It happened some time ago. Right after the Community Server update on the blog, in fact. I was bothered by the way that the links over on the right hand side were displayed in the order they were added, even though in the design interface they were sorted Read More...
Posted Saturday, March 24, 2007 12:47 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments
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Having a 'c09' container clearly implies that one can contain an Aussie

So Ben asked me via the contact link: Hey Michael, Great Blog you've got going here. A colleague of mine at work introduced me and I thought i'd ask you a question which has been plaguing me for a while. I want to change the Display Name for my users Read More...
Posted Friday, March 23, 2007 5:32 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

Dumb ellipses?

In the spirit of dumb quotes ! A regular reader pointed me this one.... It would seem that Word' AutoCorrect feature strikes again. :-( Take a look at the episode list provided by epguides.com list for the show What About Brian : You might recognize how Read More...
Posted Thursday, March 22, 2007 6:06 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments

When language codes are reported that don't actually exist

Marvin asked in the Suggestion Box: Looks like GetLocaleInfo(0x46C, LOCALE_SISO639LANGNAME,...) returns "ns" on XP. Which is not a legal ISO-639-1 abbreviation. Should have been "nso" from ISO-639-2. Is it a bug or something by [unimaginable] design? Read More...
Posted Thursday, March 22, 2007 3:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 12 Comments

Somewhat irreverent theories on the origins of the alphabet

A friend of mine got me the new-ish 3-disc collection from the comedian Gallagher. In Melon Crazy, at 6:48 into the show, he points out that we "...park in a driveway and drive in a parkway". Like I said before . :-) Now Melon Crazy dates back to 1984, Read More...
Posted Wednesday, March 21, 2007 12:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments
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Warning: when private is used in public, it can really suck

Jeffrey's question earlier today: Hi experts, My customer has a custom designed font with some special characters in the Private Use Area (PUA). He is having a problem when trying to paste these characters (as text) into a RichEdit control in his application. Read More...
Posted Wednesday, March 21, 2007 12:02 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

The lazy yet foxy jackdaw I love jumped over my quick brown sphinx dog of quartz

A couple of days ago when I wrote about how In Vista, jackdaws appear to be somewhat endangered , I mentioned ...both strings are actually in Message Compiler resources which means they could actually be localized (though note that the above algorithm Read More...
Posted Tuesday, March 20, 2007 7:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 18 Comments

Double Secret ANSI, part 2 (the brokenest one yet, sorry 'bout that!)

So when I first posted Double Secret ANSI, part 1 (Somewhere between ANSI and Unicode) , I was only a little bit surprised when regular reader Mihai knew where I was heading.... (Mihai works for a company that produces some of those Double Secret ANSI Read More...
Posted Tuesday, March 20, 2007 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 7 Comments

A way better model for features, part 2

You may have seen the first part of this series ( A way better model for features ). Think of this as part 2.... This time I am going to use as a victim example the Microsoft National Language Support Downlevel APIs 1.0 , which I have talked about previously Read More...
Posted Monday, March 19, 2007 3:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments

Hidden via the purloined post-it technique

So this last week Cathy had her 40th birthday.... Julie had sent a mail explaining in simple terms why it was so important that something be done for this important event: First, we need to celebrate this fine milestone in her life. Second, it’s payback Read More...
Posted Monday, March 19, 2007 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments
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In Vista, jackdaws appear to be somewhat endangered

Earlier today (in There was an order for letters, iroha was it's name-oh! ) I talked about a specific pangram that has an interesting educational functionality, even in modern times. Maybe for computers too, and maybe not -- the evidence isn't in just Read More...
Posted Sunday, March 18, 2007 2:59 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 10 Comments

There was an order for letters, iroha was it's name-oh!

(Apologies to the farmer's dog Bingo !) So the question I got from a customer the other day was an interesting one: Does Windows support the Iroha ordering Kana? I did not see an option for it. Windows doesn't support it, no. Though maybe I should say Read More...
Posted Sunday, March 18, 2007 10:51 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 8 Comments

A checkpoint on search engine results contrast, ultimately leading to an irreverent bit of exposition

From time to time it is nice to see how some of the search engines are doing at their job of helping people find what they are looking for. So let's take a typical problem, like people trying to run The Microsoft AppLocale Utility on Vista. You may have Read More...
Posted Saturday, March 17, 2007 4:59 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

Just a small amount of text? That isn't very resourceful of you, young man!

John's question was simple enough: Anybody know a trick to have the Text properties of WinForm controls have their values stored in resource files rather than <formname>.Designer.cs? When the text string is long, VS automatically puts the value Read More...
Posted Saturday, March 17, 2007 3:59 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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A way better model for features

Say what you want about MSLU (you might love it, you might hate it, you might have never even looked into it enough to have an opinion), one feature that it had quite overwhelmingly in its favor was that it did its best to make sure that you could write Read More...
Posted Friday, March 16, 2007 11:11 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

Creating keyboards in C#?

In theory, you can create just about any program using any programming language. And in my time I have seen a lot of tasks that many considered to be impossible happen. But that fact alone does not make it always a good reason to try to do such a thing. Read More...
Posted Friday, March 16, 2007 4:59 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

Killing time and brain cells at the DMV

(Nothing technical here) Somebody once suggested to me that time spent in the Department of Motor Vehicles does not get charged against your life expectancy. Well, if that's true then I aged 90 minutes less today than I would have otherwise. (how is that Read More...
Posted Thursday, March 15, 2007 3:46 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments
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Intuitive Shmuitive!

uberDave asked: I'm making my first forays into the world of XAML/WPF, and I'm finding it's handling of bidirectional text to be rather confusing. For example, consider this HTML fragment: Blah <span>קֵינוֹ</span> <span>123 ABC</span> Read More...
Posted Thursday, March 15, 2007 5:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

Every character has a story #25: U+00a4 (CURRENCY SYMBOL)

(Don't these 'Every character has a story' posts remind you of a Colbert-esque Better Know a District series? Maybe I should rename the series to Better Know a Character . What does everyone think?) Just recently, John asked: Just a quick question I can't Read More...
Posted Thursday, March 15, 2007 1:39 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 11 Comments

We need to be optimizing for more than just the simple cases

We have to set our goals correctly. The other day. Murray Sargent was asking some knowledgeable people (I'm not including myself in that assessment, as I was not added to the thread until it was several messages deep!): I’m finding that NotePad on Vista Read More...
Posted Tuesday, March 13, 2007 2:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments

Track change (a.k.a. A new job that has a few things in common with the old one)

My job at Microsoft has largely (for the last 55 months or so that I have been doing it for Microsoft as a full-time employee) been work falling into three broad categories: A core chunk of Windows NLS and .NET internationalization, supporting most often Read More...
Posted Tuesday, March 13, 2007 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments
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Ask 'em if their language is Montenegrin; their answer may surprise you

The other day I was talking about Montenegro in this post . There are a whole bunch of interesting issues related to Montenegro in software even after you are done chuckling about the silly Outlook bugs. For example -- what language should the locales Read More...
Posted Monday, March 12, 2007 6:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 7 Comments

ASCII? no questions; I tell UNICODE lies

There have been a few questions coming my way lately about ASCII such as managed one this from Michael Liu: Is there a WideCharToMultiByte equivalent in .NET 1.1/2.0 for the ASCII code page? I'd like to perform a best-fit mapping of non-ASCII characters Read More...
Posted Monday, March 12, 2007 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments

Yesterday's 'justified design' is tomorrow's 'bug we fixed'

Way back near the end of 2005 in What's up with the language names? , I went through the many different language names available programmatically in both Windows nd the .NET Framework. One particular issue I went on about at length in particular was LOCALE_SLANGUAGE Read More...
Posted Sunday, March 11, 2007 6:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

The weirdness of the DST change on SIAO....

So I wrote a post and set it to go live at 12:01 am (an hour before this one is set to go live), yet it went live at 11:01 pm the day before. Even though the changeover time isn't supposed to be midnight. And why? Well, the server is (I am told) on the Read More...
Posted Sunday, March 11, 2007 1:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments

Two wrongs don't make a right, and two rights can make it wrong

The CreateWindowEx function has several flags that as documented are clearly related to right-to-left scripts: WS_EX_LAYOUTRTL Arabic and Hebrew versions of Windows 98/Me, Windows 2000/XP: Creates a window whose horizontal origin is on the right edge. Read More...
Posted Sunday, March 11, 2007 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

But is it mnemonical?

Regular reader Rosyna asked the other day in a comment to an unrelated post: What decides the mnemonics used for the various checkboxes? Like Alt+E for "Use smart cursoring" (What is cursoring, is that a word?) But how does it come to take the "e" from Read More...
Posted Friday, March 09, 2007 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 7 Comments

Double Secret ANSI, part 1 (Somewhere between ANSI and Unicode)

Anyone who reads here regularly knows that I'd always prefer to see applications support Unicode. But obviously there are a few applications out there that don't support Unicode. At least not yet. Some of those applications have been around for a long Read More...
Posted Thursday, March 08, 2007 10:15 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 7 Comments

The T's are crossed, but not all of the I's are dotted...

Localizer Michel from down the hall and one floor down had been asked about a potential bug, so after that provided me with some screenshots and asked: Hi Michael, Not sure if this is a bug or by design (legacy keyboard). Is there an alias to report and Read More...
Posted Tuesday, March 06, 2007 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

It's not just returning 1; it's returning -1

A not-so-uncommon question people ask is why ToUnicode and ToUnicodeEx return -1 when the string that they return is a dead key. I mean, especially since the return value in all other cases gives you an actual size of the buffer that is returned. Doesn't Read More...
Posted Monday, March 05, 2007 8:25 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

You're not the one out of sequence, and that's the Word

(Apologies for the Colbert reference!) It all started with a post from Pavanaja U B over in the microsoft.public.word.international.features newsgroup: I am facing this peculiar problem in Word 2007 and Vista. When I use the built-in Kannada keyboard Read More...
Posted Monday, March 05, 2007 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 9 Comments

Questions about ESE may not always be EASY for me

Perhaps I have set myself up for this sort of question, in which case I have only myself to blame. :-) But in the early hours Abbott Fleur asked me via the Contact link: Using the published api's I can query and list the contents of know tables in an Read More...
Posted Sunday, March 04, 2007 5:46 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments
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String Indexing?

Sometimes I see a documentation topic that bothers me a little bit. And then occasionally I'll see one that bothers me a lot. Like that .NET Framework Developer's Guide: Custom Case Mappings and Sorting topic that I complained about in Custom Case Mappings? Read More...
Posted Sunday, March 04, 2007 3:31 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments

The non-ASCII solution to the .NET Unicode Puzzle

So anyway, I was pointed to Chris Mullins' .NET Unicode Puzzle and was struck by the irony of the use of the ASCII code page rather than the CharUnicodeInfo class (which I used for my own solution to the problem in Stripping Diacritics ). I don't mean Read More...
Posted Sunday, March 04, 2007 12:10 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 8 Comments

And it won't cost you an arm[enia] or a leg, either!

Language Interface Packs are not something that Microsoft has been charging people money for. So you can easily get your Mapudungun , اردو , Inuktitut , മലയാളം , Qhichwa Simi , فارسی , isiZulu , ಕನ್ನಡ , नेपाली , Afrikaans , कोंकणी , Setswana , বাংলা , Read More...
Posted Saturday, March 03, 2007 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments
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