Font selection in BW when using UTF-T/Unicode

Whether a given character is displayed correctly does not only depend on the correct character encoding but also depends on the selected font. One benefit of Unicode is the ability to represent many languages and scripts in a single string. This is also a problem, since very few fonts support more than a couple of scripts.

Fonts that have glyphs for all supported scripts and for all Unicode characters are very rare. The font "Arial Unicode MS" is one of the most complete proportional fonts for Windows, and yet it does not contain all the glyphs associated with all Unicode code points. The “Arial Unicode MS” proportional font contains support for all LN Locales except for the Vietnamese Locale. This font is delivered with the Microsoft Office 2000 product and later versions. This font is particularly useful when the LN backend is running in Unicode mode and contains textual data from a variety of scripts.

For viewing and printing LN reports, a fixed width font is used. There is no fixed width font available which contains glyphs for a wide range of Unicode characters. Therefore viewing and printing LN reports which contain a mix of characters from various scripts can be problematic.

Note: With Infor BW no specific font files will be delivered.

The font selection mechanism that is used in Infor BW and BWPRINT is based upon these properties:

  • Typeface name (the name of the font)
  • The backend locale of the LN user. This locale is set in the User Data Template (ttams1110m000) session. It is advised to set this locale to match with the primary language of the user (in case of Traditional Chinese, Language code o, set the locale to BIG5_XXX).

When the font indicated by the typeface name does not correspond with the backend locale of the user, Infor BW and BWPRINT selects an alternative font that does support the backend locale. (Server locale has precedence over typeface name).

For selecting the typeface name of a font for a specific UI object, Infor BW uses these rules:

  • For most UI controls, BW will use the font that is linked to menus in the Windows display settings. This font can also be changed through the BW Configuration dialog, Tab Font, property: "Standard Baan Windows Font".
  • The font for the title bar of all main windows will follow the active title bar setting in the Windows display settings.
  • The font for the items in the tree control follows the Windows setting for “icon”.
  • The font that is used for the BW message box follows the Windows setting for “Message Box”.
  • The font that is used for displaying tooltip and status bar messages in BW follows the Windows setting for “tooltip”.

For character windows and the LN text editor, two fixed width fonts are configured in the BW configuration dialog, Tab Font. One for 80 columns windows and one for wider windows. The BW character window is used when previewing a report (send report to display).