why doesn't tamil language works in richtextbox for vb6 & how to workaround this?

Question

hi guys,

i have an editor like app in vb6, and i'm looking for a richedit which can support tamil input using win xp tamil ime input. it's weird but i can key in chinese, japanese, english, arabic, french using the richtextbox but somehow tamil will just appears as ?? when i key it in using the ime. however if i do a copy and paste from notepad/words/webpages the tamil text will appear just fine.

now this app being an editor and all, of course i can't ask the users to do this. and i use the locked and unlocked certain text in the richtextbox a lot and thus far the only thing that i found near a unicode compliant richtextbox was Edanmo's richedit control. but it doesn't allow for direct ms ime input too. and i've already try hexagora control set which include a richedit control too, as i think ti's based on edanmo's richedit, naturely it doesn't work too.

so now i need to find a fully working unicode compliant richtextbox control, or workaround it somehow as i have the unitoolbox2 controls. i'm thinking of using the unitext and somehow switch it to the foreground and background and link the text back to the richtextbox for the locking, etc.

So does anyone know of any good richtextbox unicode tool or has a good workaround for my problem? And why does tamil language stands out in this case? is it because the richtextbox wasn't designed to support tamil?

thanks

Answer 1

The answers to this question list some Unicode controls for VB6.

Tamil is one of the few languages with no Windows codepage (see MSDN). VB6 handles strings partly in Unicode and partly by dropping into code page representations - see this good but unavoidably long explanation by guru Michael Kaplan. VB6 runtime interaction with controls uses code pages. Michael Kaplan's excellent book on VB6 internationalization says the Unicode-only languages can cause problems. Luckily for me, I've never had to deal with these languages myself!

If you try some of the workarounds for displaying characters that aren't supported on the current system code page, like Unicode controls, I imagine that will help. Post back and let us know what works.