Thread: Hebrew support

i am running Windows 2000 Pro SP2 with the latest version of Pgadmin II 1.2.0

 

i have a Postgres database encoded in Unicode (I tried this in PG7.1 and 7.2) 

Pgadmin doesnt allow me to type Hebrew characters and doesnt display the hebrew at all.

FYI - all the other Windows applications allow data entry of hebrew from Notepad to Office 2K

 

OTOH - pgaccess works just fine - enabling entry and display of hebrew.

 

danny lieberman

----- Original Message -----

From: Dave Page

To: 'Dannyl@barak.net.il' ; pgadmin-hackers@postgresql.org

Sent: Monday, February 18, 2002 4:45 PM

Subject: RE: [pgadmin-hackers] Hebrew support

Hi,

 

Currently pgAdmin doesn't support Hebrew characters, due to (as I understand it) limitations in Visual Basic. :-(

 

Unless someone can tell us otherwise....

 

Regards, Dave.

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Dannyl@barak.net.il [mailto:dannyl@barak.net.il]
Sent: 18 February 2002 13:45
To: pgadmin-hackers@postgresql.org
Subject: [pgadmin-hackers] Hebrew support

i am running Windows 2000 Pro SP2 with the latest version of Pgadmin II 1.2.0

 

i have a Postgres database encoded in Unicode (I tried this in PG7.1 and 7.2) 

Pgadmin doesnt allow me to type Hebrew characters and doesnt display the hebrew at all.

FYI - all the other Windows applications allow data entry of hebrew from Notepad to Office 2K

 

OTOH - pgaccess works just fine - enabling entry and display of hebrew.

 

danny lieberman

Hi Danny, I've added comments prefix with DP:

_____________Original message ____________
Subject:    Re: [pgadmin-hackers] Hebrew support
Sender:    "Dannyl@barak.net.il" <dannyl@barak.net.il>
Date:        Mon, 18 Feb 2002 18:35:28 +0000

Dave,
Thank you -
fwiw - VB supports hebrew fine.



DP: I probably phrased that badly. What I mean is that the controls that ship with the English vesion of VB doesn't
seemto do Unicode well. 

There are two issues I believe - 1 for Pgadmin and 1 for PG
1) Input methods - W2K supports input methods in just about every
language known to man.  At installation time you choose lang. support
and you're set. This enables you to do a right-alt-shift in W2K and
start typing hebrew in any Windows application. It might be an issue of
which VB objects for input methods you use or how you use them .



DP: I've been very careful in the design of pgAdmin to use only standard VB controls to minimise compatibility
problems.Unfortunately they still exist :-( Internationalisation is probably my weakest area. In particular we've had
troublewith Japanese.... 

My own theory is that it's a font problem (I can find no other possibilities) but I can't test this myself as I don't
knowhow, and no-one else seems to be able to tell me.  If this is the problem, then we have to find the best way of
handlingfont files that can be 30Mb+ 

Jean-Michel.. if you are reading, have you had any more thoughts on this? If we knock up a test app, can you test on
anyof you machines? We could at least then allow the pgAdmin user to select the font, and have them download a suitable
oneif required.  


2) Data encoding  - Windows 2K and Office deal with Unicode as UCS-2. PG
encodes with UTF-8.  I think what is happening (and mind you I may be
wrong) - is that Pgadmin reads the UTF-8 and being a Windows application
tries to display it in whatever encoding it's objects support.  Excel
can READ a PG UTF-8 encoded table but needs to export as a Web page in
UTF-8 to be able to display the hebrew properly.

This is why Pgaccess works ok - it is written in tcl8 and reads UTF-8
from PG and displays the hebrew using it's i18n library.


HAVING said all this - all I really want to do is to get Postgres 7.1 or
7.2 to order hebrew properly in any encoding - which doesnt seem to
work.... -:(



DP: I'd post that problem to the pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org list.

Regards, Dave

Hi dave
thx for the comments. I will post the question and my solution which is
being tested as we speak - that
if u REALLY want proper collation then you need to run on a glibc2.2 machine
i.e. RH7.1+ and set the locales
to something like he_IL.utf8 and make sure the locale support is correct at
initdb time.

I will ask one of my team about the VB controls - I think it should be
possible to build localized version
danny

----- Original Message -----
From: "Dave Page" <dpage@vale-housing.co.uk>
To: <pgadmin-hackers@postgresql.org>; "Dannyl@barak.net.il"
<dannyl@barak.net.il>; "Dave Page" <dpage@vale-housing.co.uk>
Cc: <jm.poure@freesurf.fr>
Sent: Monday, February 18, 2002 9:02 PM
Subject: Re: [pgadmin-hackers] Hebrew support


Hi Danny, I've added comments prefix with DP:

_____________Original message ____________
Subject: Re: [pgadmin-hackers] Hebrew support
Sender: "Dannyl@barak.net.il" <dannyl@barak.net.il>
Date: Mon, 18 Feb 2002 18:35:28 +0000

Dave,
Thank you -
fwiw - VB supports hebrew fine.



DP: I probably phrased that badly. What I mean is that the controls that
ship with the English vesion of VB doesn't seem to do Unicode well.

There are two issues I believe - 1 for Pgadmin and 1 for PG
1) Input methods - W2K supports input methods in just about every
language known to man.  At installation time you choose lang. support
and you're set. This enables you to do a right-alt-shift in W2K and
start typing hebrew in any Windows application. It might be an issue of
which VB objects for input methods you use or how you use them .



DP: I've been very careful in the design of pgAdmin to use only standard VB
controls to minimise compatibility problems. Unfortunately they still exist
:-( Internationalisation is probably my weakest area. In particular we've
had trouble with Japanese....

My own theory is that it's a font problem (I can find no other
possibilities) but I can't test this myself as I don't know how, and no-one
else seems to be able to tell me.  If this is the problem, then we have to
find the best way of handling font files that can be 30Mb+

Jean-Michel.. if you are reading, have you had any more thoughts on this? If
we knock up a test app, can you test on any of you machines? We could at
least then allow the pgAdmin user to select the font, and have them download
a suitable one if required.


2) Data encoding  - Windows 2K and Office deal with Unicode as UCS-2. PG
encodes with UTF-8.  I think what is happening (and mind you I may be
wrong) - is that Pgadmin reads the UTF-8 and being a Windows application
tries to display it in whatever encoding it's objects support.  Excel
can READ a PG UTF-8 encoded table but needs to export as a Web page in
UTF-8 to be able to display the hebrew properly.

This is why Pgaccess works ok - it is written in tcl8 and reads UTF-8
from PG and displays the hebrew using it's i18n library.


HAVING said all this - all I really want to do is to get Postgres 7.1 or
7.2 to order hebrew properly in any encoding - which doesnt seem to
work.... -:(



DP: I'd post that problem to the pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org list.

Regards, Dave

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jean-Michel POURE [mailto:jm.poure@freesurf.fr]
> Sent: 19 February 2002 09:07
> To: Dave Page; pgadmin-hackers@postgresql.org; Dannyl@barak.net.il
> Cc: pgsql-general@postgresql.org; pgsql-admin@postgresql.org
> Subject: Re: [pgadmin-hackers] Hebrew support
>
>
> > Jean-Michel.. if you are reading, have you had any more thoughts on
> > this? If we knock up a test app, can you test on any of you
> machines?
> > We could at least then allow the pgAdmin user to select the
> font, and
> > have them download a suitable one if required.
> Dear Dave,
>
> It is not a problem of fonts:
> - Some VB controls support UCS-2 unicode and others do not.
> - PostgreSQL odbc driver does not support UCS-2 yet.
>
> UCS-2 has been added to the odbc to do list.
> http://developer.postgresql.org/todo.php * > Unicode(UCS-2)
> support
>
> So, even if odbc supported UCS-2 Unicode, I am not sure
> pgAdmin2 would be able to display Hebrew data because of VB
> limitations.
>
> The only really UCS-2 compatible $W product seems to be Access2K.
>
> A solution would be to use Windows Hebrew encoding
> server-side in PotsgreSQL.
> I don't know if is workable.

Yeah, but as Danny says he can display Hebrew from PostgreSQL in MS Excel,
surely that proves that it's not all the ODBC driver?

My other thought was regarding the ODBC driver though - currently we ship
the non-multibyte one with pgAdmin (and that's what I package for the ODBC
site) - would it help or hinder us if we shipped the Multibyte version (I'm
really in the dark here so I'm relying on your expertise :-) ).

Cheers, Dave.

> Jean-Michel.. if you are reading, have you had any more thoughts on this?
> If we knock up a test app, can you test on any of you machines? We could at
> least then allow the pgAdmin user to select the font, and have them
> download a suitable one if required.
Dear Dave,

It is not a problem of fonts:
- Some VB controls support UCS-2 unicode and others do not.
- PostgreSQL odbc driver does not support UCS-2 yet.

UCS-2 has been added to the odbc to do list.
http://developer.postgresql.org/todo.php * Unicode(UCS-2) support

So, even if odbc supported UCS-2 Unicode, I am not sure
pgAdmin2 would be able to display Hebrew data because of VB limitations.

The only really UCS-2 compatible $W product seems to be Access2K.

A solution would be to use Windows Hebrew encoding server-side in PotsgreSQL.
I don't know if is workable.

Regards,
Jean-Michel

Le Mardi 19 Février 2002 10:16, Dave Page a écrit :
> Yeah, but as Danny says he can display Hebrew from PostgreSQL in MS Excel,
> surely that proves that it's not all the ODBC driver?

OK. UTF-8 is plain ASCII coded on 1, 2 or 3 caracters. If MS Excel is UTF-8
compatible and smart enough, it should display data. I see no problem in
this. Same as for Access 2K.

> My other thought was regarding the ODBC driver though - currently we ship
> the non-multibyte one with pgAdmin (and that's what I package for the ODBC
> site) - would it help or hinder us if we shipped the Multibyte version (I'm
> really in the dark here so I'm relying on your expertise :-) ).

The only solution I see would be to convert UTF-8 to UCS-2 in VB with our own
scripts. This ***might allow the grid to display UTF-8 caracters. Whooo...

Cheers,
Jean-Michel POURE

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jean-Michel POURE [mailto:jm.poure@freesurf.fr]
> Sent: 19 February 2002 11:50
> To: Dave Page; pgadmin-hackers@postgresql.org; Dannyl@barak.net.il
> Cc: pgsql-odbc@postgresql.org
> Subject: Re: [pgadmin-hackers] Hebrew support
>
>
> Le Mardi 19 Février 2002 10:16, Dave Page a écrit :
> > Yeah, but as Danny says he can display Hebrew from PostgreSQL in MS
> > Excel, surely that proves that it's not all the ODBC driver?
>
> OK. UTF-8 is plain ASCII coded on 1, 2 or 3 caracters. If MS
> Excel is UTF-8
> compatible and smart enough, it should display data. I see no
> problem in
> this. Same as for Access 2K.
>
> > My other thought was regarding the ODBC driver though -
> currently we
> > ship the non-multibyte one with pgAdmin (and that's what I
> package for
> > the ODBC
> > site) - would it help or hinder us if we shipped the
> Multibyte version (I'm
> > really in the dark here so I'm relying on your expertise :-) ).
>
> The only solution I see would be to convert UTF-8 to UCS-2 in
> VB with our own
> scripts. This ***might allow the grid to display UTF-8
> caracters. Whooo...

Hmm, that sounds like fun. :-)

Thanks anyway...

/D