Status on unicode version of VPE?

[bemsofpe]

What is the status on a full unicode version of VPE?
Is it already in the works? Any (even vague) release schedule available?

I have changed company and am looking for a good printing solution for my new company ATA IT bvba. Since I was extremely happy with VPE at my former company I would like to stick to that, but unicode support is becoming more and more important.

Patrick Elsen

[IDEAL Software Support]

Unicode can not be expected before the mid / end of 2011.

[Sodero]

Any news on this? This, I'm afraid, is slowly evolving into a show stopper for us.

Regards,
Ola Söder

[IDEAL Software Support]

As written in our posting above.

[nc1264]

Ola,

I have VPE 3.5 working with RTF and generating languages like Russian, Bulgarian, Thai, Korean, Simple Chinese, etc. Some languages I have not been able to run succesfully in VPE 3.5 are Hindi (although it can be done using a special font -> Kruti Dev), Complex Chinese and Japanese.
RTF, however, needs some tweaking and trust me when I tell you that it took me a lot of time to make it all work.

I'm not sure if all of this will work in under 4.0 and higher.

Unicode has also been on my list since I started using VPE (over 8 years ago) but it still has not yet materialized.

Regards,

Ron

PS you can check it here: http://www.akzonobel.com/polymer/msds/index.aspx and select a product, country + language. All documents are generated by Visual Foxpro 8 using VPE 3.5 enterprise edition. We also use the Adobe Generic Postscript printer + Ghostscript and NOT the Idealsoftware PDF engine as this engine will not support the languages that we want. The strange part in this is that VPE will display it correctly...but the created PDF by VPE itself does not. Adobe GPS + Ghostscript solve this issue.

[Sodero]

Hi Ron!

Thank you for your information, good to know that unicode + vpe isn't a dead end, even if "proper" unicode support never materializes.

Regards,
Ola

[nc1264]

Ola,

please note that I'm not using ANY Unicode. All it done with RTF. The RTF, however, needs to be tuned to make it work. Under MS Windows this means that you should not use MS-Word to generate RTF. MS-Word puts so much garbage inside of the RTF that no tool (including VPE) can make any sense of it. MS, however, does have a nice RTF control that will strip the RTF to it's bare essential without the MS-Word things. The RTF should also NOT contain any Unicode references like \u10035 etc. It should be double byte pairs.

Take my word for it that it took me many days to make this all work. But now that I know all the ins and outs it is running very stable. Even Idealsoftware did not believe that I got all this to work as they did not support any of this in version 3.

Let me know if you need any help...

Regards,

Ron