ESRI China (Hong Kong) Limited

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1 Setting Proper Windows XP Environment for Displaying Spatial Data with Traditional Chinese Article ID : Software : ArcGIS Desktop 9.x Platform : Windows XP Home, Windows XP Professional Date : September 30, 2005 Background To work with spatial data with Traditional Chinese, users have to pay attention to certain environment settings in their operating systems in order to display the Chinese characters correctly. For Hong Kong users, a language patch should also be installed in their operating systems in order to display the Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set (HKSCS). This article aims at pointing out some frequently asked questions and phenomena encountered by our users when using ArcGIS with Traditional Chinese data under Windows XP environment. Notes 1 Configure Windows XP Language environment 1.1 The system locale and the user locale must have the same language setting for ArcGIS to run properly in a selected language environment. An administrator must be logged in to complete the following procedures. 1.2 Open Regional and Language Options in the Control Panel. 1.3 Select the appropriate language listed under Standards and formats on the Regional Options tab. This sets the user locale. All rights reserved. P. 1 of 5

2 1.4 Click Apply. 1.5 Select the same language specified for the user locale in 1.3 on the Advanced tab. This sets the system locale. 1.6 Click Apply. 1.7 Click Yes. 1.8 Click Yes to reboot the system. 1.9 NOTE: If you do not see the language you are looking for in the drop down lists... a) Select "Languages" tab b) Check one or both of these as necessary... "Install files for complex script and right-to-left languages" "Install files for East Asian languages" 1.10 You will see that both System and User Locales are set to Chinese (Hong Kong S.A.R.) and the East Asian languages is installed, these are basics for ArcGIS to display Chinese characters. All rights reserved. P. 2 of 5

3 2 Displaying Characters in HKSCS 2.1 Having properly set the system locale and user locale, if you want to display characters in HKSCS, the HKSCS 2001 Support Package must be installed. This package can be downloaded from Microsoft HK website: Here are two examples with and without this package installed and the data source is Shapefile of which the DBF file is using BIG5 encoding: without HKSCS2001 Support Package installed with HKSCS 2001 Support Package installed 2.3 邨 and 鰂 are two typical HKSCS characters, without the package, they will not be displayed and carried in subsequent geoprocessing, but with the package installed, you can see the characters and thus for subsequent labeling and geoprocessing. 3 The LANG variable 3.1 ArcMap will crash at start up on an Windows XP Asian operating system if the ArcInfo Workstation LANG variable is set to a European language. 3.2 This is caused by conflicting language setting in the environmental variables and the system locale. The Windows NT operating system only provided limited international language support. To accommodate this, the LANG variable had to be set as System Environment Variable. The Windows XP operating systems provide complete international language support so the LANG variable is not required for ArcInfo Workstation. 3.3 If it is necessary to use the LANG variable, set it to ZH_TW. 4 ArcGIS Desktop and Unicode 4.1 ArcGIS Desktop applications, such as ArcMap, are Unicode based, so they support Unicode to a certain level. The level of Unicode support depends on the data format. Currently a personal All rights reserved. P. 3 of 5

4 geodatabase is the only data format that supports Unicode by default. It is even possible to store and display characters of multiple languages in a single personal geodatabase. If the characters are not displayed correctly, verify that the font is set to Unicode font, such as Tahoma. 4.2 Shapefiles also support Unicode, but not by default. To enable Unicode support in shapefiles, a registry key needs to be modified. Please refer to Note ArcSDE geodatabases have limited support for Unicode and depends on the character set setting of the underlying database. For example, if you are using Oracle and create the database to store Unicode Characters, you must set an NLS_LANG variable in the client machine. 4.4 Coverage and other legacy data formats do not support Unicode. Please use geodatabases for these formats to store and display Unicode data. 5 Enabling Unicode Support in Shapefiles 5.1 To store Unicode characters in Shapefiles, registry key should be modified as follows: 5.2 To add a key, Open Registry Editor (click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK.) In the registry tree (on the left), go to 'My Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software' and click the registry key ESRI Add a new key called Common (on the Edit menu, point to New, select Key, and type the name "Common" and then press ENTER) Click the registry key you just created (Common) and add a new key called CodePage. 5.3 Add a new string value dbfdefault to the CodePage key Click the key CodePage On the Edit menu, point to New, and then select String Value Type "dbfdefault" for the new value, then press ENTER The new CodePage key should look like this: All rights reserved. P. 4 of 5

5 5.4 Enter a code page value Select the entry you just added, -- it is important that you select dbfdefault, and not (Default) On the Edit menu, click Modify In Value data, type the new code page value, and then click OK For Unicode, type UTF Having set this dbfdefault key and values, the shapefiles you created in ArcCatalog will be able to store Unicode characters. For existing shapefiles which is BIG5 encoded, you can export the whole shapefile in ArcMap to a new shapefile which will convert all characters to Unicode characters. 5.6 The shapefile created or exported in this way will have an additional file association: *.cpg. 5.7 Only ArcGIS Desktop recognize Unicoded Shapefiles. 6 Visual Fortran Runtime Error 6.1 When attempting to start or use any of the ArcGIS Desktop products, user may experience a Visual Fortran Run-Time error. This error may occur when the system locale and the user locale in the Regional Options are not set correctly. ArcGIS loads the appropriate code page files, which are used internally by ArcGIS to support various languages and character sets, to perform language-related operations using both the system locale and the user locale settings. 6.2 Check the system locale and user locale when this error appears. You must also pay attention to the LANG variable. If the problem still exists, please contact our support analyst via itss ( The End All rights reserved. P. 5 of 5