2009-07-27

In a recent project, we translate a Flash website from English to Chinese. All goes well at the very beginning. But we notice that we are in troubles when we encounter the following issues:

1. The input text fields did not accept Chinese input
2. When we compile the project in a Chinese OS environment. Now the Chinese input is accepted but the SWF output file is in a big size
3. The automated notification email fails to show Chinese
4. The text logging file fails to show Chinese

It takes me nearly a whole week to solve all those issues. I would like to share the tips with those in the same boat.

• To accept Chinese input, we choose the most standard “SongTi” font family in the input text field
• To reduce the file size, we don’t embed any characters. See attached screenshot. 

• To make the automated notification email work with Unicode in ASP
  • We save the ASP file in UTF-8 encoding.
  • we set the locale ID to Unicode in the email script (CDONTS),
    Set objCDO = Server.CreateObject("CDONTS.NewMail")
    .........
    objCDO.SetLocaleIDs(65001)
• To make the text logging work with Unicode in ASP
  • We save the existing logging text file in UTF-8 encoding
  • We change the text logging script to
    SET objFS = SERVER.CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")SET objF = objFS.OpenTextFile(myFullPath,8,TRUE, -1)
    .........

That's all. It just takes only minutes to implement (but takes me a week to test and find it out). :-(