Re: Pasting Greek Characters into screens/datafiles

There appears to be a few mis-understandings about multilingual support for
i display files...

To back up to the original note, the Open data type is not what you want to
use in order to support Greek. Open is for DBCS languages such as Japanese,
Korean, and Chinese (Simplified and Traditional). Greek is a single byte
(SBCS) language and so you can create your display file using traditional
character data types. To support just English (more properly Latin 1) and
Greek you will want to have your terminal configured to run with a Greek
CCSID and make sure your application program is sending it Greek (and
English) data. This would generally mean having the job running with a Greek
CCSID and having your database CCSID tagged as Greek. If the database is
English/Latin 1 only, you're not going to have much luck reading and writing
Greek to the database (unless you're running in CCSID 65535 and managing the
data yourself -- which is NOT recommended). You should have no problem using
Greek from any i GIVEN that you have properly tagged Greek data.

As to Unicode support, the 5250 data stream has directly supported Unicode
for years. Though I can't recall off hand the first release, it is certainly
supported on all current releases (V5R3 thru 7.1). When the 5250 device
(emulator) contacts the i information is exchanged concerning the
devices/emulators capabilities. One piece of this information is related to
support for Unicode. If the device supports Unicode, then Unicode encoded
data can be exchanged directly between the two systems. The "can" is
conditioned by whether or not the display file is Unicode enabled (Graphic
data type) and, in order to really be effective in concurrently supporting
say Greek, Japanese, Turkish, Cyrillic, and Thai, if the application program
and backing database are also Unicode enabled. My presentation that was
referenced in an earlier note for instance shows concurrent use of English,
German, Russian, and Chinese. Emulators supporting Unicode include Access
for Web, HATS, and others.
Bruce Vining
On Mon, Jun 27, 2011 at 4:55 PM, Stuart Rowe <rowestu@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

James

You're right, there's no such thing as unicode data in the 5250 stream --
it's all single-byte-based. The workstation manager translates the unicode
fields on the screen (graphic type, ccsid 1200) into the code page of the
DEVICE you are using. Right before populating the output buffer it
translates from that code page back into unicode.

Brian

I had good luck with said unicode fields on screens, and running a device
with a greek (cyrillic, whatever) code page on it (at least a code page
that
has a character set containing the odd characters you need). This is the
only character set you will "see" when the unicode data hits the display.
Luckily, most of the popular non-English code pages also contain capital
and
lower-case english characters.

Stu



On Mon, Jun 27, 2011 at 12:57, James Lampert <jamesl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

wrote:

Brian Johnson wrote:

Forgive my ignorance, but multi-language is not my forte.

Actually, you probably need to code the fields as Unicode (I believe
that would be type "C" in RPG, but I'm not sure), and you would need a
terminal (or emulator) that handles Greek EBCDIC, in order to see
anything but "substitute" characters in terminal-based applications.

If there's such a thing as a Unicode 5250 data stream, I've never
encountered it, even in documentation.

--
JHHL
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