Multilingual Installer ARP: reduced font size or squares replacing Unicode characters

[Christian_Lecle]

Hi,

We upgraded our project from IS2009 to IS2010 to support multi languages file names (among the 11 supported languages, we have german, chinese, english, ...).

This upgrade solves the multi languages file names support. To do so, we set the "Build UTF-8 database" to "Yes" after converting our projects. Unfortunately this upgrade raises a new issue with ARP UI dialogs (font size reduced in english and replaced by squares for the other languages).

Other users encounter this issue (see below)
http://community.flexerasoftware.com/showthread.php?t=192487
http://community.flexerasoftware.com/showthread.php?t=192533

We need to support multi languages file names. So "Build UTF-8 database" must stay to "Yes". Is there a way to quickly workaround this bug?

Thanks in advance,
Christian

[MichaelU]

Hi Christian,
As linked in one of the threads you mention, Microsoft has documented that the UTF-8 database is not fully supported. In our testing, it works in all the important ways except for basic UI modes. And since some languages require a Unicode encoding, we offer the option in InstalShield.

The only option I know to work around this bug is to provide an external UI. This is not a trivial amount of work, especially if you can't require a recent enough version of Windows Installer to use an embedded external UI (version 4.5 added this, I believe).

[#3]

Using Installshield 2011 I think I may have found a workaround. by creating separate releases for each language, and for the english release I uncheck the UTF-8 dtatbase. I only get errors if my filenames have odd characters in them (shortcuts are fine with odd characters). So rename the files, leave the shortcuts as you need them and it might work.