International Versions

We normally develop software on machines configured to run English language versions of Windows. There are one or two issues if you are using the software under different versions of Windows or with different languages activated.

Languages and Character Sets

Most of the characters we use come from the ASCII character set and these are normally consistent whatever code page is used (a code page is used to map special language specific characters to the upper 126 characters of an 8-bit ANSI character set). However, we have used a few characters found in the Latin-1 code page to simulate some of the mathematical symbols on the keypad. If you use a code page other than Latin-1 (for example Hebrew, Greek or Eastern European) some or all of these characters are not available, regardless of whether they exist in the currently selected font.

We have two solutions to this. Depending on the code page you are using, the software will change button legends to use available characters. This may mean that the legends for the multiply and divide buttons or some of the exponential functions may not exactly match the documentation. For example the square root button may be labelled "sqrt".

The Unicode character set removes the problem of mapping code pages by having a very large multilingual character set. We have a Unicode version for Windows, but Unicode is only supported on WindowsNT (4 and higher), Windows2000 and WindowsXP. It is not supported on Windows95, 98 or ME. If your operating system supports Unicode you can use the Unicode version of the software. You should then be able to see all the correct button legends regardless of your language settings provided your fonts contain the appropriate glyphs. You may need to select an appropriate font, e.g. Arial, for the keypads using the Options/View tab.

Decimal and thousands separator symbols

You can change the decimal point character from the Options/Display tab. When the software is first run, it takes a default value for the decimal character depending on your locale. Subsequently it will retain whatever value you set it to. If you have previously run the software (including an earlier version) the value for the decimal character will be retained from this earlier version (from the registry). This may mean that you have to set the value manually.

The thousands separator can also be selected in the same way, but by default it is set to "none" so that there is no digit grouping.