MBCS File Menus generate ???? Characters

Question

I am working on an MBCS app using MFC. I am trying to support Asian languages. For the purposes of this discussion, we'll say I'm trying to support Chinese. I am able to support Pop up dialogs via MessageBoxW and Dialog SCREENs by pasting Chinese characters directly into the RC file. I can't get file menus to work using either resource view or editing the RC file directly. Whenever I type in ANY Asian character, the screen shows ???. One ? for each character. I have tried modifying the menu in C++ using ModifyMenuW. I get more question marks. Visual Studio shows everything working, and the RC file is unicode (UTF-16). I can't easily convert my project to unicode mode. Spanish, French, and German all works fine (one of the Essets in German doesn't work, but that isn't a show stopper). What should I try next?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Well, the easy answer would be change the application to Unicode, but this is not always simple, or possible at all.

Concerning using Unicode in a MBCS application, some things are possible and some others not. For example, I have made a MBCS application displaying and editing translations of program strings (messages, menues etc) in a ListView control, however ListView does have a specific message to turn it to Unicode ( LVM_SETUNICODEFORMAT ) and support operations (see also CCM_SETUNICODEFORMAT ). Menus aren't controls though, but they do have "wide" (Unicode) functions.

If you want to use Unicode in your application, there are some tests you need to make. Success is not guaranteeded, but you can at least draw some conclusions and determine whether what you want to do is possible.

Test1:

You mentioned trying ModifyMenuW() , but this will try to modify an existing menu. Instead, try InsertMenuW() or InsertMenuItemW() . Any unicode string should be displayed properly, so try not just Chinese, but other laguages too (eg Greek or Russian). And btw, I can't see how French works and German doesn't (they use the same codepage - West European). What's the system codepage of your test-machine?

Test2: (if the above has failed)

Try changing the whole menu ( SetMenu() ) with having a single (unicode) menu item as its root.

Test3: (if the above have failed)

Then you need to check whether the window containing the menu must be Unicode. Create a simple "Hello World" Win32 application, or find a sample, if Visual Studio does not do this for you (these basically register the window class, create the main window and start the message-loop) - you must add a menu too, using the "wide" version of the menu functions explicitly. If this doesn't work, try changing the code that creates the window to unicode. This way you will know whether you need a unicode window, to own the menu.

Please make these tests and let us know the results. I will further post if needed.