Subject: Re: Windows IME support mysteries
From: Andrew Dunbar (hippietrail@yahoo.com)
Date: Sun Apr 15 2001 - 21:20:50 CDT
Mike Nordell wrote:
>
> Leonard Rosenthol wrote:
> > > SM_DBCSENABLED
> >
> > DBCS is different than Unicode enabled.
>
> Oh, I didn't know that. I though that since Unicode _is_ the DBCS on
> windows, then
> "ENABLED" matched "enabled". Do you have a pointer with some info?
Nope. DBCS (or MBCS) encodings are the old guys such as Shift-JIS
for Japanese, Big 5 for Chinese etc. They are *multibyte* extension
to ASCII. The ASCII range (and sometimes more) are all single byte,
with the main body of characters being double or multi byte.
Windows has supported these old DBCS encodings for many years but
Unicode only since NT.
Unicode is a single large character set embodying all the world's
characters. On Windows it's UCS-2 which is two bytes per character.
On Unix it's UTF-8 which is anywhere between 1 and 6 bytes per
character.
> I apparently don't understand at all what "Unicode enabled" _really_ means.
> :-)
You are not alone! This actually makes importing/exported a "plain
text" or even "unicode" file less trivial than expected.
Andrew.
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