Re: Hebrew support

Hi dave
thx for the comments. I will post the question and my solution which is
being tested as we speak - that
if u REALLY want proper collation then you need to run on a glibc2.2 machine
i.e. RH7.1+ and set the locales
to something like he_IL.utf8 and make sure the locale support is correct at
initdb time.

I will ask one of my team about the VB controls - I think it should be
possible to build localized version
danny

----- Original Message -----
From: "Dave Page" <dpage(at)vale-housing(dot)co(dot)uk>
To: <pgadmin-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org>; "Dannyl(at)barak(dot)net(dot)il"
<dannyl(at)barak(dot)net(dot)il>; "Dave Page" <dpage(at)vale-housing(dot)co(dot)uk>
Cc: <jm(dot)poure(at)freesurf(dot)fr>
Sent: Monday, February 18, 2002 9:02 PM
Subject: Re: [pgadmin-hackers] Hebrew support

Hi Danny, I've added comments prefix with DP:

_____________Original message ____________
Subject: Re: [pgadmin-hackers] Hebrew support
Sender: "Dannyl(at)barak(dot)net(dot)il" <dannyl(at)barak(dot)net(dot)il>
Date: Mon, 18 Feb 2002 18:35:28 +0000

Dave,
Thank you -
fwiw - VB supports hebrew fine.

DP: I probably phrased that badly. What I mean is that the controls that
ship with the English vesion of VB doesn't seem to do Unicode well.

There are two issues I believe - 1 for Pgadmin and 1 for PG
1) Input methods - W2K supports input methods in just about every
language known to man. At installation time you choose lang. support
and you're set. This enables you to do a right-alt-shift in W2K and
start typing hebrew in any Windows application. It might be an issue of
which VB objects for input methods you use or how you use them .

DP: I've been very careful in the design of pgAdmin to use only standard VB
controls to minimise compatibility problems. Unfortunately they still exist
:-( Internationalisation is probably my weakest area. In particular we've
had trouble with Japanese....

My own theory is that it's a font problem (I can find no other
possibilities) but I can't test this myself as I don't know how, and no-one
else seems to be able to tell me. If this is the problem, then we have to
find the best way of handling font files that can be 30Mb+

Jean-Michel.. if you are reading, have you had any more thoughts on this? If
we knock up a test app, can you test on any of you machines? We could at
least then allow the pgAdmin user to select the font, and have them download
a suitable one if required.

2) Data encoding - Windows 2K and Office deal with Unicode as UCS-2. PG
encodes with UTF-8. I think what is happening (and mind you I may be
wrong) - is that Pgadmin reads the UTF-8 and being a Windows application
tries to display it in whatever encoding it's objects support. Excel
can READ a PG UTF-8 encoded table but needs to export as a Web page in
UTF-8 to be able to display the hebrew properly.

This is why Pgaccess works ok - it is written in tcl8 and reads UTF-8
from PG and displays the hebrew using it's i18n library.

HAVING said all this - all I really want to do is to get Postgres 7.1 or
7.2 to order hebrew properly in any encoding - which doesnt seem to
work.... -:(

DP: I'd post that problem to the pgsql-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org list.

Regards, Dave