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Pocket PC Forum / End Users / ActiveSync / December 2004Why does ActiveSync still NOT support UNICODE?!
WHY ?? ActiveSync in version 2 did. Since 3, it does not. Whenever a Chinese device gets synchronized with a Japanese computer, or a Japanese device with a German computer, there are problems. Likewise other combinations. Data gets corrupted, synchronization fails, files can't be copied. You name it, you get it. Unpleasant, consistent, unnecessary. Horrible problems, considering that the solution is just the old UNICODE support, which Microsoft has propagated since Windows NT. Why then NOT for ActiveSync? WHY? >WHY ?? > [quoted text clipped - 9 lines] > >Why then NOT for ActiveSync? WHY? I think this has to do more with the limited language support in each Pocket PC - throwing Chinese, Japanese, and Latin support onto each unit would take up a TON of space in ROM. Both Pocket PC and Windows NT/2000/XP support Unicode... but a German Pocket PC (Latin fonts) would not have full support for Chinese characters.  SignatureRob Borek Microsoft MVP - Mobile Devices Want *ONE ON ONE* support? http://www.pocketpcone2one.com Please place all replies into the newsgroup so that others can benefit. Sorry no your guess is incorrect. It is possible to display Japanese/Chinese on a German PPC by just copying over the font necessary. Even if you don't have the font, the basic support is there. The information is preserved, just the font is not displayed. Windows CE is UNICODE based, after all. Anyways, there are small fonts for the languages in question. ActiveSync in version 2 on Windows NT 4 did correctly synchronize UNICODE data, at least inasfar as Outlook was UNICODE capable that day. You could copy over a file located on either side which contained Chinese and German chars, just as an example. Since version 3 this fails - the characters not in the system default codepage get replaced by ?'s. This has nothing to do with any advanced support, like sorting order. It just is a question of whether or not the file name information gets unnecessarily piped through the codepages, or whether it will be directly exchanged on the UNICODE level. Likewise for Outlook entries: You can have Chinese entries on your German PPC and if you set the font correctly they will display. You can have Chinese entries on your desktop Outlook French. But you cannot synchronize them. Now this is stupid, is it not? >>WHY ?? >> [quoted text clipped - 15 lines] > NT/2000/XP support Unicode... but a German Pocket PC (Latin fonts) > would not have full support for Chinese characters. Maybe I should better tell the story, as I remember it. ActiveSync in version 2 did support UNICODE. It was possible to copy over files from the Windows CE device to the PC and vice versa without losing UNICODE information. Synchronizing files with UNICODE filenames worked well. Outlook at that time did not fully support UNICODE, so there were some problems in that area, but I think you could synchronize independently of the codepage of the WinCE device. You were of course dependant on the PC system default codepage, because of Outlook. Then came the "unified" build of ActiveSync version 3, a single build for NT and Windows 9x. And the UNICODE support disappeared. That makes sense, as Windows 9x wasn't very good in this area. At that time, not too many users had Windows NT. Not very many Windows CE devices were out there in Asia or other non-English areas. But now Windows XP is standard, Windows 9x support is running out or has been ended. There are lots of Chinese or Japanese or other non-English devices. And not just since yesterday. So WHY then does ActiveSync STILL not support UNICODE? >>WHY ?? >> [quoted text clipped - 15 lines] > NT/2000/XP support Unicode... but a German Pocket PC (Latin fonts) > would not have full support for Chinese characters. And, of course, Outlook on the PC by now supports UNICODE. One more reason. Outlook on Windows CE always did for the Name entries. There were problems for the Notes field because of the strange RTF derivative Outlook uses for this data field. > But now Windows XP is standard, Windows 9x support is running out or has > been ended. There are lots of Chinese or Japanese or other non-English > devices. And not just since yesterday. The non-support to Unicode in ActiveSync is very big annoying issue. Some of problems have workarounds (but NOT without trouble): * For file(names), surprisingly infrared transfer support Unicode. S we could use this method but provided that we have irda in our PC whic is not usually the case for most people :( * Or we could transfer file with the help of a memory card but no everybody has memory card or the adequate card-reader for PC :( The only thing concerning me that I can't find a workaround is th way to backup Contacts. Anyone knows how to backup Contacts withou passing through ActiveSync? Or is it possible to copy a certain numbe of files representing Contacts database somewhere inside the PPC syste folder - thoru >The non-support to Unicode in ActiveSync is very big annoying issue. > [quoted text clipped - 11 lines] >of files representing Contacts database somewhere inside the PPC system >folder? Sprite's Pocket Backup can back up the entire PPC or it has a tree for selecting parts of the PPC data to back up. One tree branch is personal databases, containing phone database (for my phone edition ppc I think), contacts, categories, tasks and appointments - choose as many or as few as you like. I don't know if Sprite supports Unicode fully, my contacts have nothing more complex than a couple of umlauts which aren't double byte characters, but you could ask. -- Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons. - Bertrand Russell Steph Peters delete invalid from incm@sandbenders.demon.co.uk.invalid Tatting, lace & stitching page <http://www.sandbenders.demon.co.uk/index.htm |
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