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February 2006 - Posts

What's up with handicapped parking everywhere?

It is hard to believe it was a year ago today that I asked What's up with handicapped parking in WA state? (One misunderstanding I want to clear up about that post -- my hope that those folks parking in the spaces being contractors was not due to any Read More...
Posted Tuesday, February 28, 2006 11:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 20 Comments

Collation is slutty

Yes, according to the Slut-O-Meter, 'collation' has a 57.08% sluttiness rating . And that is before THIS post makes it into the index; it may be worse soon.... Sorting out promiscuity, I guess. Thanks (I think) to Mark Liberman for letting me know about Read More...
Posted Tuesday, February 28, 2006 9:52 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments
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A little bit of Turkish delight

Earlier today, in reponse to my post [Localized] Date/Time format tokens , regular reader Serge Wautier commented: Oddly enough, according to your screenshots, the Turkish translation seems to use the same letter (s) for hours and seconds! Let's take Read More...
Posted Tuesday, February 28, 2006 8:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 7 Comments

[Localized] Date/Time format tokens

When functions like GetDateFormat and GetTimeFormat work with format picture strings, there is a very limited set of tokens that is considered legal: Picture Meaning d Day of month as digits with no leading zero for single-digit days. dd Day of month Read More...
Posted Tuesday, February 28, 2006 1:38 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 8 Comments

EM_SETCUEBANNER vs. international support in XP and Server 2003

Yesterday, s omeone named Mike asked me, via the Contacting Michael... link: Hey there, I have a problem. I have a program that uses EM_SETCUEBANNER to add grey hint text to an edit control, something like "Enter search here". After installing east asian Read More...
Posted Saturday, February 25, 2006 2:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments

Two guys walked into a bar, but the bar was broken

It was over a year ago that I pointed out in the post Keyboards: hardware vs. software how disconnected our team (which owns most of the keyboard layouts) and the hardware team (which owns most of the actual keyboard hardware) were. And how impressive Read More...
Posted Friday, February 24, 2006 1:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 22 Comments

Do you know what UNICIDE is?

Do you know what UNICIDE is? A) A typo, with the actual word that was supposed by there being Unicode. B) Clubbing someone to death with a unicycle. C) A new cleaning product that will change your life. D) Stabbing someone to death with the sharp edge Read More...
Posted Friday, February 24, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 8 Comments
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The exception that proves the rule

Earlier today in the post On an upgrade, we maintain , I talked about how we have a very strong desire to retain a user's locale preferences on upgrade. It may just be that extra three inches from the ground that would make people feel a little uncomfortable Read More...
Posted Thursday, February 23, 2006 9:45 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments
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On an upgrade, we maintain

It may seem to you like deja vu all over again, But I am going to once again quote a bit of Mostly Harmless by Douglas Adams, just as I did in this post : Ford Prefect hit the ground running. The ground was about three inches farther from the ventilation Read More...
Posted Thursday, February 23, 2006 1:15 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 21 Comments
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Keep off the grass

Well, at the very least keep MSLU apps out of the VMWare shared folders? :-) The other day, Brian asked in the microsoft.public.platformsdk.mslayerforunicode newsgroup: I have a strange situation, seemingly involving MSLU on VMWare. First, let me say Read More...
Posted Wednesday, February 22, 2006 1:20 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments
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And the digits just keep on coming

I have definitely talked about digit substitution many times since I started with this blog . And then I posted about my disillunsioned realization that Uniscribe was simply not doing as much as it could in the post Digits -- there is no substitute . Read More...
Posted Wednesday, February 22, 2006 6:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments

Don't muck with the combining character order

The communicative property of addition clearly does not apply to combing marks in Unicode. Or at least it is not supposed to. I mean, A + B is not the same as B + A, in any situation where that order is meant to enforce how they are placed in relation Read More...
Posted Tuesday, February 21, 2006 12:11 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 15 Comments

What about the Microsoft Custom Locale Builder?

Regular reader Ivan Petrov asked in the Suggestion Box: Hi Michael ;-) Would you tell us something more about Microsoft Custom Locale Builder!? Thank you in advance. Regards, Ivan. Now this is the sort of thing that people like Cathy and I (not to mention Read More...
Posted Tuesday, February 21, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 9 Comments
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Mirroring and Keyboards are complicated

The other day, Shou-Ching Schilling (LAM) asked me via email: Hi, you have helped me with many keyboards questions before, so I thought you might know the answer to this one or know who else to contact. I am doing some testing on Arabic keyboards. Sometimes Read More...
Posted Monday, February 20, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 9 Comments

A chance for me to give practical advice!

The other day, Tracey asked me: hi, i was searching the internet for how to buy bulk /cases of trader joe products when i came across your site. im so totally addicted to their fruit laces and organic fruit leathers. at 27 cents each they are a real bargain Read More...
Posted Monday, February 20, 2006 12:00 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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Making a mark in code windows

Takes you right back to What are directional marks -- chumps who point? but t he other day, Cyrus Najmabadi asked on an internal alias about one of those interesting mixed LTR an RTL text that cause so much grief such as a function signature in Visual Read More...
Posted Sunday, February 19, 2006 2:29 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 10 Comments
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Seeing Duncan Sheik at The Triple Door

Last weekend, I went to see Duncan Sheik last weekend at The Triple Door in Seattle. It was funny, I had bought a couple of tickets and I had also put up some flyers for his management so my name was at the door for myself and a guest, too -- so I found Read More...
Posted Sunday, February 19, 2006 2:01 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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Where are the IE plain text fonts?

Santhosh Pillai has a special status in the hearts and minds of some people in our group. Maybe it was just really good timing, but he was the first really knowledgable language contact that our (at the time) new locale data owner was able to work with Read More...
Posted Sunday, February 19, 2006 7:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 17 Comments

I didn't check in shit today

Warning: if the site censors this post I'll probably pull it down and repost after I find out how to avoid the censors, maybe with a bit of phishing! :-) A small riff on Language Log's Geoffrey K. Pullum, and his post I didn't write shit today .... Mike Read More...
Posted Saturday, February 18, 2006 2:51 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments
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What do you get when you combine a base character with a buttload of diacritics?

The other day I was looking at a particular bug repro (it was actually that BACKSPACE vs. DELETE bug I have mentioned before, if you were curious). Anyway, I decided to take the letter a and put as many different diacritics on it as I could. Here it is: Read More...
Posted Friday, February 17, 2006 1:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 19 Comments
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What's the latest on the MS front?

(Nothing technical, you know the drill) I realize that I have probably been a little remiss in posting about what is going on lately, and there are at least a few people I know who probably only read this blog because of that (not everyone is into the Read More...
Posted Friday, February 17, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments
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Who decides the category of a character and why?

Regular reader Maurits asked in the Suggestion Box: Eric Gunnerson recently posed a regex challenge to strip nonprintable characters from a string: http://blogs.msdn.com/ericgu/archive/2006/01/16/513645.aspx While investigating the IsC Unicode property, Read More...
Posted Thursday, February 16, 2006 12:01 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments
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Ignoring a problem does not make it go away....

Yesterday, when I posted Every character has a story #19: U+200c and U+200d (ZERO WIDTH [NON] JOINER), I got an interesting comment from Yosuke HASEGAWA: Using ZERO WIDTH (NON) JOINER or ZWNBSP(BOM) to filename or registory key and values, you can create Read More...
Posted Thursday, February 16, 2006 6:10 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments
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Every character has a story #19: U+200c and U+200d (ZERO WIDTH [NON] JOINER)

In the world of Unicode, it is small irony that what usually causes the most emails to be exchanged and the most documents to be written are the characters that have no actual visible representation. Whether it is U+feff (a.k.a. ZERO WIDTH NO BREAK SPACE, Read More...
Posted Wednesday, February 15, 2006 8:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 10 Comments

Mixing MLang and Uniscribe

Ian Treleaven asked in the Suggestion Box: Thanks for getting to my Uniscribe question this past December, which I now realized was very open-ended. I would like to see an example or hints on font substitution when using Uniscribe. It seems you can use Read More...
Posted Wednesday, February 15, 2006 2:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

Every character has a story #18: U+06cc and U+064a (ARABIC LETTER FARSI YEH and ARABIC LETTER YEH)

Some people may recall when I talked about how It does not always pay to be compatible . In that post I talked about how in Arabic there are four possible shapes for each character -- isolated, intial, medial, and final. I'm going to talk about a slightly Read More...
Posted Tuesday, February 14, 2006 2:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments

A Read-Only, Modified CultureInfo?

Elliot asked: Apologies if this is the wrong alias for this question or if this question has been asked before. I’m running into some strange behavior and I’m trying to figure out if I’m doing something wrong, if this is by design, or if there may be Read More...
Posted Tuesday, February 14, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

Don't change the font, dammit!

I'll be the first person to say at a party that the NULL GLYPH (􏿿) is not going to engender the most intuitive user experience when it is displayed in a user interface. (It might in fact be why I am not invited to more parties!) But even I will admit Read More...
Posted Monday, February 13, 2006 12:01 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 9 Comments

Getting all of the localized names of a font

Greg Tavares asked in the Suggestion Box: I am desparately trying to figure out how to get both the English names of fonts AND the localized names through the Win32 API. I'm on Japanese Windows XP. I call EnumFontFamiliesEx. By default I get the localized Read More...
Posted Monday, February 13, 2006 3:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 8 Comments

x is like a box of chocolates....

I have been thinking about snowclones, and not just because of Mark Liberman's most recent mention of them in his post The proper treatment of snowclones in ordinary English . It was actually happening due to someone asking me via email about the arguably Read More...
Posted Sunday, February 12, 2006 7:31 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments
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Collation can actually be linguistic

I pointed out in the post Some sort of order to collation that it is easy to dismiss linguistic issues when one is thinking about collation. As Steven Pinker pointed out in The Language Instinct : ...for the same reason that alphbetical order is similar Read More...
Posted Sunday, February 12, 2006 3:05 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments

Knowing English as a second language? A third? Or at all?

I read with amusement Mark Starr's Why Doesn't Anyone Speak English in Torino? (Well, most of the amusement was with his conclusion " in a real emergency, at least the hookers here speak English. " It is interesting how there is an implicit assumption Read More...
Posted Saturday, February 11, 2006 3:27 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 13 Comments

Installing supplemental langauge support programatically

Paul Langton asked via the contact link: Gday Michael, Firstly, love the blog and though a lot of it is waaaay over my head its always a great read, I'd go so far to say the best of all the MSDN blogs that I've sampled. OK suck up out of the way, I have Read More...
Posted Friday, February 10, 2006 2:16 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 36 Comments

It is all backwards!

(nothing technical, yada yada yada....) Years ago, travelling was always a pain. At first because I had to walk with the cane which was hard over long distances. Even standing in line was a pain. And then when I started asking for wheelchair service because Read More...
Posted Thursday, February 09, 2006 9:15 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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Every character has a story #17: U+534d and U+5350

Regular reader Maurits asked in the Suggestion Box: What kind of name for a character is this?? http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/534d/index.htm Well, first (and most importantly), I should point out the name of the Unicode character U+534d Read More...
Posted Thursday, February 09, 2006 3:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments

Is RtlCompareUnicodeString used correctly?

I'm not sure how many of you remember when I posted Hungarian is even more complicated than I thought and More on the fabled EqualString . Not because I don't have stats or anything, but because there is no way to gauge how many of you are new readers Read More...
Posted Thursday, February 09, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 12 Comments

They make 'em smarter than GetDateFormat

Last month I talked about GetDateFormat and using the DATE_LTRREADING/DATE_RTLREADING flags with it in Return of the Mark . Now, there is a lot going on here when we are deciding issues of directionality. S o let us try to separate all of the issues. Read More...
Posted Wednesday, February 08, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments

If the text is not complex, does it have to be treated like it is?

James Brown asked in the microsoft.public.win32.programmer.international newsgroup: I have a fully working Uniscribe wrapper which renders a line of Unicode text, using the low-level ScriptItemize /Layout/Shape/Place/TextOut calls. Its working pretty Read More...
Posted Tuesday, February 07, 2006 8:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 5 Comments

ELK cultures for other platforms

Ever since that first post about ELKs ( Lions and tigers and bears ELKs, Oh my! ) there has been a lot of interest in this mechanism. But that is not the only thing that generates interest. For example, Dieter asked the following question in the microsoft.public.win32.programmer.international Read More...
Posted Tuesday, February 07, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 4 Comments

Maybe there is such a thing as a surrogateS character (dammit!)

(No, the title of this post does not contain a typo!) I have a regular reader of this blog who is a 12 year old young man named Dean. He has an interesting take on my post There is no such thing as a surrogate character (dammit!) . Although he did not Read More...
Posted Monday, February 06, 2006 7:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 9 Comments

In my estimation, most keyboard layouts suck

Leave it to me to have professional blog post titles! It all started yesterday when I posted Keyboards: Monolingual or Multilingual? Now in that post, I focused on a few of the challenges that the champions of a multilingual keyboard face when they aim Read More...
Posted Monday, February 06, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 9 Comments

Is a synopsis of a symposium a synopsium? :-)

The other day, when I talked about how I was Approaching linguiticalishnessality , a comment from Thierry Fontanelle of the MS Speech and Natural Language group pointed out that the quarterly symposium in computational linguistics held by Microsoft and Read More...
Posted Sunday, February 05, 2006 12:11 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments
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Keyboards: Monolingual or Multilingual?

The importance of having multilingual keyboards is often a controversial one. I have often been amazed to watch people who feel intensely that it is important for their keyboard to support multiple languages, and compared them to others who also expressed Read More...
Posted Sunday, February 05, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 19 Comments

Have you stayed with us before, sir?

Steve Clayton talked about how the fact that hotels have moved to the common phrase Have you stayed with us before, sir? When I first read his post I was swept into all of the information that they could have which they could use to customize the experience Read More...
Posted Saturday, February 04, 2006 3:01 PM by Michael S. Kaplan | 0 Comments
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The answer is dependent on the question (aka Turkish Delight)

The truism in the title of this post seems fairly obvious. Though in several situations this week, I have had to point out this fact when I explained why the answer they got turned out to not be the one they wanted.... A lot of it comes down to the use Read More...
Posted Saturday, February 04, 2006 12:05 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 2 Comments

We're drowning in LIPs!

You'd think we were at a Rolling Stones concert or something! I do love to talk about those Language Interface Packs . We now have not only the Nepali and Konkani LIPs, but we have two more -- for Bengali and Malayalam ! A Bit About Bengali বাংলা (Bāṇlā Read More...
Posted Friday, February 03, 2006 8:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 27 Comments

Problems in the MVP world?

I have to admit I am troubled by this article. It does mirror some of my thoughts about parts of the program these days. It is definitely not the program from back when I was an MVP in the mid-90's.... I do know from personal experience that our two 'international' Read More...
Posted Friday, February 03, 2006 8:30 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 6 Comments
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Explaining the problem with comments on the blog

(a little blog maintenance) I thought I would explain what is happening with the comments here on blogs.msdn.com (at least until they fix the problems, that is!). It currently looks like the following problems exist: Leading spaces will be removed, which Read More...
Posted Friday, February 03, 2006 5:31 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 14 Comments
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Another interview question

Earlier today, in response to my post What is equal to some may not be equal to others , Christian Kaiser asked me : Do you see a faster way to do a string comparison than to use CompareString(), just like NOTEPAD's programmer's idea, but correct? It Read More...
Posted Thursday, February 02, 2006 7:14 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 30 Comments

What is equal to some may not be equal to others

Someone going by the handle AC asked me via email: You have mentioned that Google has trouble with equal strings not being treated equally. But you have never talked about similar problems with Office or other Microsoft applications. Do other problems Read More...
Posted Thursday, February 02, 2006 12:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 3 Comments

On [not] localizing a MessageBox from code

Mohit Gogia asked me via the contact link (though the suggestion box would have better!): Hello Michael, I have posted this internally and on forums but couldn't get any definitive answer to the question. Please help me with the following. I am having Read More...
Posted Wednesday, February 01, 2006 10:01 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 1 Comments

It speaks my language (well, almost!)

Joseph Bruno asked in the Suggestion Box: You're designating locales for every subsubregion of every subregion of every region in the world, and presumably there'll be language-specific versions of Windows in at least some of those. Given that, do you Read More...
Posted Wednesday, February 01, 2006 5:25 AM by Michael S. Kaplan | 17 Comments
 
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