Re: DOS v Win encoding

[Wolfgang Bechstein bechstein@xxxxxxxx]

"Patricia M. Godfrey"  wrote:

> Actually, I found it quite interesting.

In the interest of full disclosure, and for it to go into the archives
next to the Harry-Carl exchanges, where--one never knows--a future
non-lower-ASCII Nip-Xy adept as yet unborn may find it useful, here is
a copy of my latest message to Robert; written after I remembered that I
had access to a system with English Windows XP but set up for Japanese,
and used that as a test bed.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hello again Robert,

sorry to clutter your mail box with more tedium, but some experimenting
with the English XP system here (let's call her Nancy) has brought me to
a solution of sorts, and I thought I should inform you.

I'll try to be brief.

Initially, with Nancy fully set to handle Japanese, the situation was
exactly the same as on my native Japanese XP system (Hanako). But then I
tweaked various settings that control language handling and gradually
turned Japanese support off (without actually uninstalling fonts etc.).
Not all settings had an effect, but the following two make all the
difference:

Control Panel -- Regional and Language Options -- Languages -- Details
-- Default input language  [Change from Japanese IME to English]

Control Panel -- Regional and Language Options -- Advanced -- Language
for non-Unicode programs [Change from Japanese to English]

That brought Nancy fairly close to the original English state (still
capable of displaying and even entering Japanese, but menus in some
Japanese programs turn to gibberish), and lo-and-behold, CLIP worked
exactly as advertised (as you say it does on your system), copying my
test sentence including umlauts back and forth between Xy and WinWord
etc. just fine.

With the above information, I set to work on Hanako (which is my main
work computer, and which _must_ have Japanese XP). Changing the two
settings listed above to English had the same blissful effect: CLIP
started to work just fine and copied umlauts back and forth like a champ!
Unfortunately, what this does to some of my Japanese programs
(interestingly not MS Office applications, though, which remain usable)
is such that I cannot remain in this state permanently, and changing the
settings involves a reboot, which is a bother. But it will enable me to
use CLIP on certain occasions when I am working on translation jobs that
require me to paste text containing German back and forth (mostly forth,
from Xy to Win). So I am _almost_ a happy camper, but I still would be
very much interested in trying out your all-singing all-Unicode-converting
version of CLIP whenever it is ready (because I suspect that this may
even work with the settings left in Japanese).

Incidentally, if you were feeling very charitable and adventurous and
had a lot of time to kill, you could probably duplicate the problem I
had with CLIP by temporarily enabling Japanese support on an XP system
of yours (after suitable backup measures I presume). You would have to
install support for Asian languages (which is included in English XP)
and then make the two settings I described above, in the opposite
direction (in particular, setting the default language for non-Unicode
programs to Japanese). But I guess you probably don't want to go that
far.
(BTW, as I noticed the truncation problem can even be tested without
leaving XyWrite, simply by doing CLIPWC of a string containing some
umlauts and then doing CLIPWP within the same Xy file. If XP is set up
for Japanese as described, the string will be truncated. If set up for
English, the full string will be pasted.)

Anyhow, thanks for reading this far. I do have a somewhat kludgy
solution now, which will let me sleep already considerably better.

Cheers,

Wolfgang Bechstein