by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2007/11/21 10:16 -05:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2007/11/21/6456609.aspx
You might remember blogs like Double Secret ANSI, part 2 (the brokenest one yet, sorry 'bout that!) and Sometimes when you say 'the fix is in' you mean it in a good way, where a bad bug was introduced, reported, and then fixed, in both an upcoming service pack and in a hotfix.
But although it was easy to get th word out to one company that was affected, it seems that another company did not get the word.
So Adobe knows and has a solution for all of their nrfoken non-Unicode applications.
But clearly Skype might not, as per the following bug report in their database:
Problem with Ukrainian Language/Keyboard Layout on Windows Vista
Could somebody with a login over there put this data in the bug? :-)
And while you are there you could suggest that they should move to Unicode....
This post brought to you by ț (U+021b, a.k.a. LATIN SMALL LETTER T WITH COMMA BELOW)
# Cristian Secară on 21 Nov 2007 1:06 PM:
For my language (Romanian) Skype is not the only application with non-Unicode behaviour on keyboard input. NetObjects Fusion still does the same today. Yahoo Messenger was the same until the recent verion 9 (beta); still, YM still has a major bug in that AltGr+A selects the whole text and then types "a"; this way the Romanian (Programmers) keyboard cannot be used to type ă and/or the Hungarian keyboard cannot be used to type ä.
As for Adobe, hmm, what Unicode ? They are not able to handle ANSI in some applications. The Touchup Text Tool in Adobe Acrobat assumes any 8 bit character to be CP1252 ...
Cristi
# Michael S. Kaplan on 21 Nov 2007 2:35 PM:
Well, there is SP1, and the hotfix. I can't help with the other Adobe apps that can't even do code pages (let alone Unicode!).
# Marc Durdin on 21 Nov 2007 4:08 PM:
>Could somebody with a login over there put this data in the bug? :-)
>And while you are there you could suggest that they should move to Unicode....
I've done that just for you, Michael. It looks like they are doing some magic for Unicode input in some of their controls - e.g. the chat window. Try watching in Winspector Spy (Spy++ doesn't seem to be Unicode aware), you'll see a WM_CHAR 0x3F but the correct letter will appear in the control. In some other controls, you'll just see a 0x3F "?" Of course, this could just mean that they are using a mix of W and A functions for that particular window?
# Luke Amery on 22 Nov 2007 6:38 AM:
At a guess it looks to me like the Skype front end is developed in Delphi. Delphi development generally centers around a class library (similar to the BCL in .Net) called the VCL. The VCL has not yet received your use unicode memo. Maybe you could get the message to Borland / Inprise / CodeGear whoever they are this week?
# Marc Durdin on 22 Nov 2007 5:50 PM:
As Luke says, the VCL is not Unicode and I doubt it ever will be ... seeing as it's a legacy platform now.
The TMS/TNT Unicode Component Pack (http://www.tmssoftware.com/go/?tmsuni) along with some little tweaks to VCL Forms (http://www.tavultesoft.com/keyman/documentation/unicodeinput.php) will get the average Delphi application a pretty long way towards being Unicode compatible.