Arabic cursive display problem in non-arabic Windows XP

Question

Hi everyone,

i have develped an application in C# with arabic in Labels and listboxes, it works fine in vista and in xp machines where arabic language is installed. However if i run the app in xp with no arabic language installed, it shows separate arabic characters instead of the joined cursive writing. I know this is an OS problem and not specific to my app because if i type something in arabic in notepad in a vista system and take it to the xp system without arabic, it does not display correctly.

How can this be done? I looked around for a few days for solution but to no avail. I tried to programatically install arabic fonts and used that font in my app but it dosent work. I got some 3rd party components to do the job but they dont have the grid which i need in my app.

The thing is that I have seen a different app and it works fine in non-arabic xp but i dont know how they have done it.

Can anyone help? I tried for days!!

Thanks
Philip

Philip Leong · Answer

I tried the code but it does not work. It does not even work in Vista now (arabic enabled) as the brackets come wrong in 1 direction ie instead of () it comes (( I am at my wits end, i used unicode. If you are kind enough to help, i can send you some arabic text in a unicode saved text file/word doc, can you then just take the string and display it in a label? Thanks !

Bechir Bejaoui · Answer

Hahaha, OK gdlck

Philip Leong · Answer

Hi Bechir, I had done something similar but will try out your code properly tomorrow as I dont have access to a non-arabic machine at the moment. I will keep you updated, thanks so much. Philip

Bechir Bejaoui · Answer

This is a piece of code that I found, try it class Program { static void Main( string [] args) { ConvertFile(28596, 1256, "F:\sourceFile.txt" , "F:\destFile.txt" ); } static void ConvertFile( int fromEncode /*=28596*/ , int toEncode /*=1256*/ , string sourceFilePath, string DestFilePath) { FileStream fs = new FileStream (sourceFilePath, FileMode .Open); BinaryReader br = new BinaryReader (fs); byte [] orignalEncode = br.ReadBytes(( int )fs.Length); br.Close(); fs.Close(); string unEncodedText = Encoding .GetEncoding(fromEncode).GetString(orignalEncode); fs = new FileStream (DestFilePath, FileMode .Create); BinaryWriter bw = new BinaryWriter (fs); byte [] encodedBuffer = Encoding .GetEncoding(fromEncode).GetBytes(unEncodedText); bw.Write(encodedBuffer, 0, encodedBuffer.Length); bw.Flush(); bw.Close(); } } I hope that it does the job

Philip Leong · Answer

Hi Bechir, I tried but couldnt get it to work correctly, since I am so new to Unicode. Can you put a few codes and show me how I should proceed? Should i take my label text (which as Arabic) and convert it from UTF 16 to Code page 1256 (Windows Arabic)? Will it then display properly on non-Arabic machines? Thanks, Philip

Philip Leong · Answer

Hi Bechir, Thanks a lot of the help. I will try it out and keep you updated! Philip

Bechir Bejaoui · Answer

You should encode your text using System.Encoding class and choose the encoding type that support arabic so that your text appears correctly

Bechir Bejaoui · Answer

You should encode your text using System.Encoding class and choose the encoding type that support arabic so that your text appears correctly

Arabic cursive display problem in non-arabic Windows XP

Sam Hobbs