General Info

Using International Character Sets

AutoPlay Media Studio is capable of creating applications for almost all languages and locales. This article outlines what you need to know about the support of international character sets in AutoPlay Media Studio.

Unicode vs. MBCS

AutoPlay Media studio is not Unicode compliant. It is compiled with multi-byte character sets (MBCS) enabled. That means that languages that require Unicode support cannot be directly supported in AutoPlay Media Studio when using text and fonts. However, some users have worked around this restriction in the following ways:

Using International Codepages

AutoPlay Media studio does support international codepages through the use of the character set option when specifying fonts. When specifying a font for an object, go into the Font dialog and select the appropriate character set in the "Script" field. This will enable the appropriate codepage for the object.

One thing to note when using international code pages is that while the international characters will always show up fine in "drawn" objects such as the Label, Paragraph and Button, they will only appear properly in "Windowed" objects (Input, ListBox, etc.) if you have the respective version of the Windows Common Control library installed on your system. So, for example, if I am working on an English language system (without Greek language support also installed) and I use the Greek character set in a Label object, the text will appear properly with Greek characters. However, if I do the same thing with an Input object, the characters will not appear properly on my English system although they will on a system with Greek language support installed.

Setting a Character Set in the Script Editor

If you want to change the character set used in the script editor at design time, open a script edit window (on the "Script" tab of object or page properties), right-click on the script editor and choose "Editor Settings…" from the menu. On the Color/Font tab, press the Change button in the Font section and select the appropriate script.

Using Right to Left Read Order

If you are designing an application for a language that uses right to left read order such as Arabic or Hebrew, you can set the read order for objects in the following ways:

Another thing to keep in mind if you are developing for right to left languages is to layout the page from right to left. Even the shadows on buttons should generally be on the left side of the object, if possible.

Filenames

It is generally advisable that you use Latin characters in your file, object and page names within your project. This is not a strict requirement but it is a best practice that will help avoid unforeseen errors down the road.