Use of the Copyright symbol & language issues

[DPulaski]

Desperately need some advice here - we have an installer that supports several languages and we're having a problem with one specific situation:

On one dialog panel, we have a text string that contains the Copyright symbol (©). This displays fine until you have a Windows machine that is set to use an English locale, but with the Control Panel option for "Language for non-Unicode Programs" set to Chinese (PRC).

In this situation, when you run the installer and select English as the install language, this string displays the copyright symbol as a question mark (?).

Is there any way around this? I have tried embedding the copyright symbol both with the actual © character, and with the \u00A9 unicode escape sequence. In the first situation, the © appears as a "?". When using the escape sequence, the literal sequence including the backslash is displayed (there is no translation done at runtime).

Any advice on how to get the © to display correctly? For that matter, why does the "Language for non-Unicode Programs" setting even relevant to an Installshield program? I thought Installshield supported Unicode, no?

[MichaelU]

InstallShield the IDE supports Unicode, but as of IS2008 its runtime had to be in ANSI to support Windows 9x. If this is a basic MSI project, each language is stored on a single explicit code page; IS 2010 adds the option to use UTF-8 for that code page. Unfortunately the InstallScript and InstallScript MSI interfaces are not yet purely Unicode even in IS 2010.

[DPulaski]

MichaelU wrote:
InstallShield the IDE supports Unicode, but as of IS2008 its runtime had to be in ANSI to support Windows 9x. If this is a basic MSI project, each language is stored on a single explicit code page; IS 2010 adds the option to use UTF-8 for that code page. Unfortunately the InstallScript and InstallScript MSI interfaces are not yet purely Unicode even in IS 2010.

Thanks for the response, Michael. Not sure I completely understand, Unicode and these language issues are still new territory for me.

So are you essentially saying here that there is presently no fix to what I am trying do in getting the © symbol to display in other languages, particularly Chinese?

[MichaelU]

Right. On InstallScript UI, the strings are stored encoded on a single ANSI Code Page, and the code pages for most East Asian languages do not have the copyright, trademark, and other such symbols. In Basic MSI before IS 2010, the same is true of the strings, but the dialogs presented by Windows Installer are Unicode on non-9x platforms. This is what lets the UTF-8 option in IS 2010 Basic MSI projects do its magic.

I should probably also mention that generally we recommend using ASCII-safe characters, replacing the symbols with multi-character representations such as (C) (R) and TM.