I totally missed the passing of Michael Scott Kaplan some 2 years ago, so a belated R.I.P. is in place.
Obituary for Michael Kaplan, Michael Scott Kaplan, 45, passed away Wednesday, October 21, 2015, in Redmond, WA, after a brave battle with MS for 25 years. He was a lead software developer for Microsoft.
Michael was the leading source on i18n, L10N, Unicode, sorting, normalisation and other things having to do with languages, representations and writing.
Besides that he was a really nice guy of which I enjoyed his MSDN materials.
We all recognize emoji. They’ve become the global pop stars of digital communication. But what are they, technically speaking? And what might we learn by taking a closer look at these images, characters, pictographs… whatever they are 🤔 (Thinking Face). We will dig deep to learn about how these thingamajigs work. Please note: Depending on your browser, you may not be able to see all emoji featured in this article (especially the Tifinagh characters). Also, different platforms vary in how they display emoji as well. That’s why the article always provides textual alternatives. Don’t let it discourage you from reading though! Now, let’s start with a seemingly simple question. What are emoji?
His report basically comes down to that when using Ansi character literals like #255, the compiler treats them as single-byte encoded characters in the current code page of your Windows context, translates them to Unicode, then processes them.
I disagree, as the issue happens without any hint or warning whatsoever, and causes code that compiles fine in Delphi <= 2007 to fail in subtle ways on Delphi >= 2009.
The compiler should issue a hint or warning when you potentially can screw up. It doesn’t. Not here.
Quite a few knowledgeable Delphi people got involved in the discussion:
A while ago, I had to fix some stuff in an application that would write – using a binary mechanism – UTF-8 and UTF-16 strings (part of it XML in various flavours) to the same byte stream without converting between the two encodings.
Some links that helped me investigate what was wrong, choose what encoding to use for storage and fix it:
The trick comes down to enabling the PreferExternalManifest registry setting and then create a manual manifest for the application that forces the application to use “bitmap scaling” by basically telling it does not support “XP style DPI scaling”.
You name manifest file named after the exe and stored it in the same directory as the exe.
After that, you also have to rename the exe to a temporary name and then back in order to refresh the cache.
A quote from the trick:
In Windows Vista, you had two possible ways of scaling applications: with the first one (the default) applications were instructed to scale their objects using the scaling factor imposed by the operating system. The results, depending on the quality of the application and the Windows version, could vary a lot. Some scaled correctly, some other look very similar to what we are seeing in SSMS, with some weird-looking GUIs. In Vista, this option was called “XP style DPI scaling”.
The second option, which you could activate by unchecking the “XP style” checkbox, involved drawing the graphical components of the GUI to an off-screen buffer and then drawing them back to the display, scaling the whole thing up to the screen resolution. This option is called “bitmap scaling” and the result is a perfectly laid out GUI.
In order to enable this option in Windows 10, you need to merge this key to your registry:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\SideBySide]
"PreferExternalManifest"=dword:00000001
Then, the application has to be decorated with a manifest file that instructs Windows to disable DPI scaling and enable bitmap scaling, by declaring the application as DPI unaware. The manifest file has to be saved in the same folder as the executable (ssms.exe) and its name must be ssms.exe.manifest. In this case, for SSMS 2014, the file path is “C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SQL Server\120\Tools\Binn\ManagementStudio\Ssms.exe.manifest”.
Paste this text inside the manifest file and save it in UTF8 encoding:
This file contains hidden or bidirectional Unicode text that may be interpreted or compiled differently than what appears below. To review, open the file in an editor that reveals hidden Unicode characters. Learn more about bidirectional Unicode characters
This “Vista style” bitmap scaling is very similar to what Apple is doing on his Retina displays, except that Apple uses a different font rendering algorithm that looks better when scaled up. If you use this technique in Windows, ClearType rendering is performed on the off-screen buffer before upscaling, so the final result might look a bit blurry.The amount of blurriness you will see depends on the scale factor you set in the control panel or in the settings app in Windows 10. Needless to say that exact pixel scaling looks better, so prefer 200% over 225% or 250% scale factors, because there is no such thing as “half pixel”.
Actually, because of a a common “beautification” of many Office suites (Microsoft and Open alike), the single quote was a special one: a Unicode Character ‘RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK’ (U+2019) which in UTF-8 is encoded as 0xE2 0x80 0x99.
Notes on contents of the MAPPING directory:
EASTASIA:
This directory is obsolete.
ETSI:
ETSI GSM 03.38 7-bit default alphabet mapping.
ISO8859:
These are the mapping tables of the ISO 8859 series (1 - 16).
OBSOLETE:
Obsolete and unsupported mapping tables for historical
and archival purposes only.
VENDORS:
Miscellaneous mapping tables for small codesets, typically provided
by vendors. The majority of current, useful tables are here.
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 