Unsolved Special characters in briefing
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Hi, since i installed bms 4.37.2 on windows 11. I have this issue with special chars in briefing screen. So for example with Mayday-Mayday-Mayday. I then get weird chars for the minus char. Is there a fix for this like installing font or adjust language setting?
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@Obi1 Hello, the texts of the briefing are edited in a file called “strings”
C/Falcon BMS 4.37/Data/Campaign
Falcon doesn’t support characters like ', ¿ , ¡ , ñ , and some others that I don’t remember.
Open the file, search for the exact phrase where the invalid character appears and remove it or change it to a synonym.
I don’t think it’s a Windows problem, it’s a character problem not supported by Falcon. It can also happen with TacRef texts and atc Radiotexts. But those are different files, not for the briefingAnyway, I don’t know why this error happens, if it were something general it would happen to everyone. Even so, follow the steps mentioned and delete that character, your briefing will appear normally
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@Apolo27 Thanks, I also see it in a program i wrote myself. that could display all text okay when i worked on win7. But on my new system the same text is garbled on a label control, but okay on a editbox caption. Even in the same program. And why i think its not a Falcon issue per se.
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@Obi1 screenshot? what default language and locale is your OS?
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@Obi1 So the problem may be that you don’t have a necessary font in your operating system, Arial Narrow type or similar. My solution will fix the Falcon briefing but it won’t solve the problem on your PC with the disallowed characters
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@airtex2019 said in Special characters in briefing:
@Obi1 screenshot? what default language and locale is your OS?
Windows 11, region setting, system
locale English(United States)
There is also a Beta setting there: Use Unicode UTF-8 for worldwide language supportDon’t have a picture yet but for example in briefing screen: â[]œMAYDAYâ[][](three times)
or with : survivorà[]tms -
@Obi1 that definitely sounds related / relevant … if you turn off the “Use Unicode UTF-8 for worldwide language support” and reboot … does the problem go away?
curious – was that setting turned on by default, for Win11?
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/design/globalizing/use-utf8-code-page
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@Obi1 The characters that are not supported in the briefing with your operating system fonts are:
line 177 and 227 Survivor’s ' this character is repeated in a lot of lines
line 149,172 and 255 “Mayday” " this character is also in lines 261 and 262 -
@airtex2019 said in Special characters in briefing:
@Obi1 that definitely sounds related / relevant … if you turn off the “Use Unicode UTF-8 for worldwide language support” and reboot … does the problem go away?
curious – was that setting turned on by default, for Win11?
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/design/globalizing/use-utf8-code-page
The setting was off by default. But for BMS it does not change anything. On or off. But in my own application some text parts are better. Others still wrong.
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@Obi1 just to be clear – is it the Briefing screen within BMS that’s garbled … or the briefing.txt/html output, or as shown by external software?
you can hit [win+shift+S] to take a small screen snip.
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@airtex2019 said in Special characters in briefing:
@Obi1 just to be clear – is it the Briefing screen within BMS that’s garbled … or the briefing.txt/html output, or as shown by external software?
you can hit [win+shift+S] to take a small screen snip.
Yes, its the briefing screen in BMS itself. The text you show. Its shown correctly at your side. But mine is like a posted above.
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@Obi1 looking at Strings.txt in a hex editor, it is indeed using extended-ascii range bytes for the “fancy” doublequote chars.
So, easy fix for the dev team – just change those to regular doublequote chars.
But I’d love to understand why this is going wrong for you, and nobody else… that’s a big part of why I’m active in this forum – a forcing function to learn about OS changes like this.
I somehow spent decades writing C code for Windows and never had half the crazy problems, big or small, that plague BMS.
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@Obi1 said in Special characters in briefing:
I also see it in a program i wrote myself. that could display all text okay when i worked on win7. But on my new system the same text is garbled on a label control, but okay on a editbox caption.
Do you have language-bar enabled … different input-language selected?
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@airtex2019 said in Special characters in briefing:
@Obi1 looking at Strings.txt in a hex editor, it is indeed using extended-ascii range bytes for the “fancy” doublequote chars.
So, easy fix for the dev team – just change those to regular doublequote chars.
But I’d love to understand why this is going wrong for you, and nobody else… that’s a big part of why I’m active in this forum – a forcing function to learn about OS changes like this.
I somehow spent decades writing C code for Windows and never had half the crazy problems, big or small, that plague BMS.
Yes. sometimes I wonder too why i am the only one that gets this type of thing and nobody else yet has seen it. Anyway, yes i have english and dutch language on language bar. I think i used both but problem stays same.
The intresting part for me is that that beta setting for utf-8 does fixes a character in my own program, but on another control, the same copy paste character is shown wrongly. In my case its the small circle sign in Celsius for example. Maybe the beta option is called beta for a reason in windows 11? -
@Obi1 the little degree symbol is another extended-ascii character, just like the fancy-doublequote chars
this is an area I feel like I should be able to help more – but I have only a superficial understanding of code-pages and character-sets, sorry
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@airtex2019 Yes, same here. I am a developer myself and worked with unicode and utf-8 stuff. But sometimes still unclear how things mess up with every new system. I will look at why the degree sign in my programm works and not works at the same time at different places and controles. I have an idea to use 2 different keycodes. like 248 and 0176 there are 2. And for bms i just hope it will be fixed in Win11 or in BMS itself one day.
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@airtex2019 Okay i found the problem, at least in my own application, what was causing the issue with the degree sign. At least the workaround was to add the textstring on runtime into the control. Putting it directly into the controls property text field gave the problem.
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@Obi1 C#? Winforms or WPF (XAML)? C++ (RC files)? something else?