How to render unicode characters in the correct font? (C#/WinForms)

Question

My application correctly handles different kind of character sets, but only internally - when it comes to displaying text in standard WinForms labels und textboxes, it seems to have problems with chinese characters.

The problem seems to be the font used (Tahoma), because when I copy&paste the text, or view it in the debugger, it is displayed correctly. Also when I set MS Mincho as the font to be used, the characters on the screen look OK.

Of course, I don't want to use MS Mincho in the entire application. Do I have to switch the font depending on the characters displayed, or is there a better way I have missed?

Make sure you don't use MS Mincho for Chinese. That is a Japanese font. You should use SimHei or SimSun for Simplified Chinese and MingLiU for Traditional Chinese. They are different, and a native will instantly spot the difference. And bzlm is right, there is something wrong with you forms, they should work out of the box even with Tahoma due to the font linking done by the system. — Mihai Nita
– Mihai Nita, Commented Nov 19, 2009 at 7:40

bzlm · Accepted Answer · 2008-09-25 19:58:15Z

4

UniScribe, which was introduced in Windows 2000, is supposed to handle this transparently, meaning that it will automatically use a different font (such as Mincho) for characters that aren't present in the font you've selected. This is why it looks correct in the debugger, even though the font used in the debugger doesn't contain Chinese characters. Perhaps you are doing something that disables UniScribe, or is problematic in some other way. Perhaps if you could paste some code it would be easier to identify the problem.

answered Sep 25, 2008 at 19:58

bzlm

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2 Comments

Stefan Schultze Over a year ago

Seems like this is the kind of library I've been looking for.

bzlm Over a year ago

@Stefan If you use the standard development mechanisms (ie. Visual Studio), UniScribe should already be there and do the work for you (see comment by Mihai on question).

Internet Friend · Accepted Answer · 2008-09-19 16:59:49Z

0

All fonts don't have data for all the glyphs that can be expressed in unicode. You´ll have to locate a suitable font which has the subset you want.

edit: Just to clarify, there are fonts which cover the full unicode range, but the one you´re using now isn´t one of them.

edited Sep 19, 2008 at 16:59

answered Sep 19, 2008 at 16:44

Internet Friend

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