Double-Byte or Unicode?

[GAMacky]

The manual says that it supports 1-byte and 2-byte characters. But there's a big difference between what is called a double-byte characters and Unicode characters. Double-byte characters are 2 characters combined to represent a single character. The first character of a double-byte character must be in a certain value range for the application to recognize that the character and the next character combined are part of a double-byte character. This was used mainly in Asian countries before Unicode came along (win95, win98, winNT3, winNT4). Now, all new Windows uses Unicode (winMe, win2000, winXP), not double-byte. Unless you have special software installed, these new windows will not recognize and display double-byte characters. Unicode basically means each character is now represented with an extra byte period. It's not considered double-byte because there's no single byte any more. The character set is now completely different than the old double-byte character sets. However, to allow backward compatibility, applications developed using the single-byte code base, can still work with some magic in Windows. They just won't support Unicode because they weren't designed to. In order for the application to work with Unicode, the application must use unicode enabled Windows API calls and Unicode enabled functions. So far, from my test of the KPro4 demo, it's not using Unicode at all. Any Unicode characters beyond U+00FF entered into the Lyrics screen shows up as question marks(?), which indicates that it's not Unicode enabled. Since the new windows do not produce double-byte characters, there's no way for me to test if it works with double-byte characters. I'll try to find a utility that'll convert between Unicode and double-byte. If I find one, I'll post the result of the test. Since I don't know what will go into version 5, as the web site states that it's completely rewritten, I'm hoping that it'll be Unicode enabled. If not, please consider it. I've searched long and hard for a lyric editor that can handle Unicode. I was so hopeful when the manual for KPro4 states that it supports 2-byte characters. But was totally disappointed when it doesn't support Unicode. If any of you knows the new features list of KPro5, please let me know. Thanks.

[GAMacky]

Ok, KPro4 does work with double-byte characters, somewhat. It displays it correctly on the screen for the most part, if you are able to display double-byte characters (depending on your windows version). But the sweep misses and leaves gaps. Sometimes the characters are not displayed correctly as KPro4 is only aware of the 2 characters that represents the double-byte and not the double-byte character itself. And sometimes the second character of the double-byte is a special character for KPro4 (*, _, ^, etc), so that'll screw things up. Since I don't have anything that'll play the exported CDG file, I don't know if it encoded it correctly or not. I'll see if there's a demo version of Microtrack to play the produced cdg file.

[GAMacky]

The demo version of Microstudio replaced the lyrics with "MicroTech". So that means the CDG file contains the text and not the code that's on a cdg disc. And since the lyrics are replaced with "MicroTech", I can't test to see if the double-byte characters will show up correctly on a cdg disc. Oh well.. I hope KPro5 supports Unicode.

[admin]

For our security protection, the "rendering code" only displays MICROTECH. The full version displays the text you enter in the font you select.

KPro 5 has full Microsoft functions that support ANSI ASCII, Unicode, and Multi-byte. We expect it to fully function as is expected for foreign languages that use Unicode. If not, we will fix it. :w