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712

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4

I have some customers who want to use our speech therapy software in Hebrew.

The programs are in VB6. The best option I'm aware of are:

  1. use the Forms 2.0 controls from MS Office, but you can't distribute them.
  2. http://www.hexagora.com/en_dw_unictrl.asp $899
  3. http://www.iconico.com/UniToolbox/ $499

Any other options?

A: 

According to KB224305 ("INFO: Usage and Redistribution of FM20.DLL"), you can install the free "Microsoft ActiveX Control Pad", which in turn installs the Forms 2.0 Library.

Maybe this is an option for you.

Tomalak
+1  A: 

Presumably your users don't have Hebrew selected as the system default code page, otherwise you could just use the native VB6 controls (bearing in mind that Hebrew is right-to-left, obviously!).

Don't use Forms 2 - it will crash your VB6 program. Microsoft Knowledge Base article: "FM20.DLL is known to have many problems when used with Visual Basic and other developer products. Its use is neither recommended nor supported in any Visual Studio product."

I've no personal experience of the others, but your #3 option UniToolbox has been around for years and Google throws up some positive chatter about it on the newsgroups (EDIT - for instance VB6 internationalisation guru Michael Kaplan recommended it in a post in 2004).

One whacky option is to use API calls with the native VB6 controls - some pointers in Michael Kaplan's excellent book on Internationalization with VB6 and some sample code on his website too. But it would be lots of work. Do buy the book anyway as it's a gold mine of information on international issues in VB6. For instance the sample chapter explains your problems with Hebrew. Look for it secondhand as it's out of print.

MarkJ
+3  A: 

I found this tutorial very useful. Yes it is partially an ad for another Unicode Control Suite, but it has a lot of information about how to do it yourself and what issues are involved.

EDIT

I knew I had way more on this stored in my bookmarks.

First of all there is an article from Chilkat (another component vendor) about how to use the Font's charset (assuming it is a unicode font) to set different font types (you have to manually change the .frm since charset isn't exposed in the gui). Then all you have to do is convert from AnsiToUTF8 and back to support different languages (that is what Chilkat's control does).

Second, there are the Vesa Piittinen's free (Creative Commons, source included) VB6 controls for download here. They include Textbox, Label, Menu, List, Dialog, CommandButton, Caption (form's caption)). I haven't played with them much, but basically he is doing all the onPaint and the nice thing is that is all done in VB and you can look at the source.

Kris Erickson
+1 that's an excellent link
MarkJ
A: 

Excellent set of free Unicode Controls for VB5/6

http://www.timosoft-software.de/

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