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On the double byte versions of Windows (such as Japanese, Korean and
Chinese), if extended characters are used in the application, the
application usually have display issues. This is due to the the way how
Windows Kernel treats the input. When you are using a Barcode font with
no double byte awareness, you will see a garbage character displayed at
the place where a barcode should stand. There are a couple of hacks
around, but none of them are clean solutions unless you are using a
double-byte compactable font.
These issues won't happen to fonts which do not contain characters
with ASCII code above 127. For the characters within the ASCII range
(0-127), they are consistent among all versions of Windows. This means
that if you are using a symbology other than Code128, ITF25, UPC/EAN/Bookland,
you will not run into this issue.
After deep research into the Windows Kernel, our development
engineers have come up a solution which allows our customers universally
use the barcode fonts on any language platforms. We have thoroughly
tested the solution on double byte Windows platforms (English, French,
Latin etc.) as well as major double byte platforms (Japanese, Korean,
Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese). This allows our customers
to write applications which adapt to most of the audience in the world.
We modified these font products to make them double byte aware:
- Morovia Code128 Fontware
- Morovia Interleaved 2 of 5 Fontware
- Morovia UPC/EAN/Bookland Fontware
If you are planning to use the three products in an Asian language
environment you need to read this article.
You need a double-byte version of
the product if you want to make Code1288,
Interleaved 2 of 5 or UPC/EAN/JAN/Bookland barcodes. Click
here to view
the product information.
As a result of adding Asian language support, Morovia Font Tools have
been updated. We added a series of functions to support the newly added
functionality. These functions ends with "Asian". If you have no plan to
apply barcode fonts in a double byte environment, you can continue to
use the old functions. On a double byte platform you must use the new
functions - the best thing is, they are also working on single byte
platform!
We carefully design the fonts to make these Asian functions simple.
If you study the source code, you will find that the only change is that
we added ASCII code E0 to every character which is beyond the ASCII code
range. The fonts handle all the internal character mapping work.
Understanding this fact you can easily come up functions on your own.
Morovia Fontpal is also updated to incorporate the changes to the
font. The new Fontpal will also work with earlier versions of the fonts.
We added several samples to demonstrate the Asian functions with
these three products. If you are running a double byte system you must
run these samples to get the results. The old samples are still kept to
be compatible with earlier versions of the barcode fonts.
This article applies to people who needs to use Code128, ITF25 and
UPC/EAN/Bookland fonts in a double byte platform. Since these three font
products use extended character set, you need to use the new fonts as
wells as the newly added functions to make them work on a double byte
platform. The new added functionality also work on all single byte
platforms. Othere fonts, such as Code39, Code93, MICR, OCR etc., do not
utilize the extended characters so you can use them with no
modifications. |
