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Special Characters/Symbols Options
Perhs
Posted: Friday, February 12, 2010 3:32:47 PM
Rank: Newbie
Groups: Member

Joined: 2/12/2010
Posts: 5
Points: 15

Hi

We are corresponding with a lot of institutions and persons around the world, and many times we need to be able to enter special characters from the extended character sets. Such characters are for instance available as symbols in Word or other software packages, but not in Iris. Some may be entered using the <Alt> key and inserting the ASCII number. Isn't it possible to have a menue item for entering special characters/symbols in IRIS?

Furthermore, when for instance entering the polish name Janečk we run into problems. The name is spelled with a 'c' having a notch on top (for example used in the cultivar name Rhododendron 'Ken Janečk'), and entering it by copy-paste from Word seems OK. But when searching it up after having saved a record, or exporting it to a report or a label, the character has reverted to a standard 'c' behind the curtain, so to speak. The same happens for a number of special, non-anglo-american characters. Hope this can be fixed!

PerHS

Øyvind
Posted: Wednesday, February 17, 2010 3:02:55 PM

Rank: Administration
Groups: Administration , Member

Joined: 8/7/2008
Posts: 54
Points: -32
Location: Oslo

Hi Per

 

The user interface and program code in Iris has full Unicode (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode) support. The issues you mention are related to the database setup. For SQL Server we are using the Windows-1252 (ANSI) character set (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows-1252) and the datatypes char/varchar as default. By changing the datatypes to nchar/nvarchar the full Unicode set can be used. This comes at a price, however, as it doubles the storage space and the amount of data that has to be handled. The good thing is that it's easy to change the datatypes, but in my opinion it should be done for fields where it's necessary only. Please send me a list by e-mail with the fields that requires this feature.

 

To enter special characters/symbols you can use the Character Map application (Accessories -> System tools in Win XP).

 

Øyvind

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