by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2010/03/16 07:01 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2010/03/16/9976677.aspx
So the other day Matt Glazer asked me via the Contact link:
Hi,
I'm an engineering student studying abroad in China, and came across some problems when I downloaded a technical dictionary program that was written in Chinese. I found that if I changed my system locale, the text would encode properly and I could actually use it (as opposed to boxes, strange accents and question marks).However, this also seems to be messing with outlook and powerpoint for the purposes of bullets, math equations and other non-letter characters. Instead of seeing sigmas or something else I'll see the chinese character for "poly-" or something else stuck in there.
My question is this: is there a good way to change the program's locale without having to restart my computer when changing the system locale every time I want to read one language or the other? Perhaps there is a virtual machine setup I could use or something? Any help is appreciated.
Now I don't know, I mean I never did graduate from college or anything, but this sounds like a job for App Locale!
You know, the one I talk about in lots of places, like The version of App Locale that runs on Vista?, etc.
If you run that dictionary program under App Locale, then everything should work just fine!
Though in the long run, finding a Unicode dictionary that, rather than supporting the small number of letters in code page 936, supports the other 50,000-odd Han that Unicode defines, is probably a better idea. But this will avoid the reboots for now....