Rave and unicode

I read very often in the newsgroups or in email about supporting unicode in Rave ....

The status is at the moment:

• Rave for Win32-developement doesn't support unicode
• Rave for the .net-Framewok support unicode

Rave for Win32

Rave is based on the VCL, no surprise. and the VCL isn't unicode-ready at the moment.
There is an interesting article in the blog from Hallvard about "unicode and VCL" with Danny Thorpe. It's not new but unchanged in the year 2007....
In the Delphi-Roadmap from CodeGear is the support of Unicode for the Win32-plattform for the first half of 2008 announced:

Delphi "Tiburón"
Time Frame: First Half 2008
Theme: Delphi and VCL development with Unicode and Generics

Delphi Win32 Unicode This means that the IDE, the VCL, and all types of development should be made fully Unicode-compatible. The standard string in the Delphi language will become a Unicode string, meaning that the IDE, the VCL – that is, the entire product – will be Unicode-based. Developers around the world will be able to develop applications for use in any language using the Unicode standard.

meaning: when the VCL inside Delphi supports unicode Rave should support unicode as well .... but this need a lot of patience.
But Nevrona have done good work in the past, since Rave is working with unicode strings and such in .NET, the conversion to the unicode for Win32 will be a lot simpler (i.e. Nevrona already have code to handle strings of different character length).



Rave for the .net-Framework

that's easy
Rave for the .net-Framework supports unicode because .net framework supports unicode ...

But don't forget that you need the right font with unicode-support... I recommend that you work inside Rave with the FontMaster. Insert a GlobalPage and name the Page into GPFonts and here you can insert FontMaster for every Font / Size / Style (I called the components in my Rave-projects FMArial12bold, FMArial10, FMArial10bold ....) and define the FontMirror of the (Data)Text and (Data)Memo to this FontMaster. Now you can define very easy on one place (!) the correct font with unicode-support. And this is the only way at the moment to change the font of (Data)Text/Memo-component inside the Rave Scripting. And you have in all your reports of the application a good corporate design-feature included.
You see, a lot of advantages for using the FontMaster-component in the Rave-Project!