Replace system fonts (2000sr1a)

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I need my messages in message boxes (in Access) to appear in Vietnamese as well as english. with previous combinations of win98 or 2000 and office 97 and 2000 (but I can’t remember in exactly which combination!) this was easy – just replace sserife.fon with the vietnamese version and we were away (with certain oddities such as the 1/2 symbol being replaced in 31/2 inch diskette). Now running o2ksr1a and win2k I can’t seem to get it to work. I’ve tried replacing system fonts, changing my locale (which I don’t really want to do), changing the default code page, changing the coding of the vietnamese I’ve written (which would be a real pain if I had to do throughout my apps), all to no avail. Anyone have any ideas? As a last resort I could create custom forms for everything, which would be a total pain, and, in my experience, lead to problems as code execution has a tendency to go in unexpected directions if I go down this route.

With some more playing around, it seems that unicode is one possibility, however this would require replacing loads of nonstandard characters in my code. I’ve tried to fill arrays with them and then replace, but there are lots of characters it doesn’t like, and if I try and use the “coded” equivalent, with asc or chr, it doesn’t seem to cope with extended unicode characters

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Right-click anywhere on your desktop and from pop-up menu choose Properties (or Start | Settings | Control Panel | Display). Click Appearance tab. In the window, click on “Message Text” in “Message Box” (or choose “Message Box” from “Item” drop-down list. Then change font from default (I believe it’s Tahoma) to any available from “Fonts” drop-down list.
Also make sure you install Vietnamese keyboard layout in (Start | Settings | Control Panel ) Regional Options | Input Locales. If you don’t see it on the list, you need to install additional support for East Asian languages.

But I think the best solution for you is to use Vietnamese version of Win2k.

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Changing the keyboard layout will allow anything typed to result in Vietnamese characters but it won’t affect the way the message boxes display. I understood the question to be how to get both English and already written Vietnamese into the same message box. Did I misinterpret the problem?

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Thanks, the message box setting worked. It seems I overlooked the obvious (although integration between windows and office is rarely obvious!).

Charlotte, you were right, and there is additional confusion in that there are 3 different coding systems for vietnamese – VNI, which most people use, TCVN, which is what the system font uses, and Unicode. My problem was how to replace the TCVN text in my code with unicode characters, but the message box setting has rendered this unnecessary (though I’d still like to know how to do it), as it has allowed me to specify a TCVN coded font.

I don’t use the win2k vietnamese keyboard layout, because it appears to me that it was designed by people who didn’t type, don’t know about vietnam, and never wrote code and typed vietnamese on the same machine (although nearly all VN input systems share this last problem, the win2k layout is even worse, using [ , ] ,(,),& and = keys as well as !).

“Vietnamese version of win2k”.

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This may not be the correct forum but since you are talking about Vietnamese language, I would like to clarify something in my own mind. I have two computers, one with Win XP Pro & Office XP, the other (older computer) runs Win 98 & office 97. We have Vietnamese fonts and keyboard driver on the older computer by using VNI Tan Ky Win32. Now, do I understand correctly that if i install unicode fonts that I will be able read Vietnamese web sites as well as use Vietnamese in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc?

I have noticed that when browsing the web with our newer (XP) computer, we can see some Vietnamese text correctly and others we cannot.

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It depends how the website is coded, and I’m no html expert, but some have used “font players” to dynamically download fonts, others rely on your local fonts (in which case there are the VNI-TCVN coding issues above), and some, including most of the professionally run sites, will now use unicode coding. I don’t fully understand the issues though, as I’ve even come across some sites where some sections are readable, and others aren’t (sometimes even on the same page). At the end of the day you probably want to install standard VNI and TCVN fonts as well as unicode fonts in order to maximise the chance you’ll be able to read a site.

As far as use in office is concerned, unicode is it’s own coding system, so if you want to use unicode you have to use unicode entry. This is supported in windows 2000 and subsequent, but I don’t know about 98. For people used to using other programs to enter Vietnamese characters, it will take some getting used to as the layout is completely different. There are some advantages if you’re going to manipulate the text, however, as the problem iwth VNI is that some letters are coded as 2 letters if displayed in a standard font, making string slicing a bit of a pain, and the trouble with TCVN is that in order(?) to avoid this problem, the additional marks and letters are coded as rarely used single characters, but this renders the text completely unreadable if viewed in a non TCVN font (unlike VNI). I haven’t played around with the possibility that unicode also overcomes some of the other oddities of VNI and TCVN, such as sort order.

HTH

PS Aaargh! I can’t believe it. Don’t know why I expected otherwise, but Unicode vietnamese does NOT sort properly. I’ll admit that sorting all words beginning with th separately from those beginning with t maybe a little tricky, but it’s quite crass that

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