How DBCS Characters Are Used Depends on the Operating System

• Standard, Professional, and Enterprise Editions of Microsoft Visual Basic, 16-bit and 32-bit, for Windows, version 4.0

SUMMARY

When using Visual Basic for Windows with Double-Byte Character Sets (DBCS) of different languages, characters from a language that does not use the same character set as the current localized operating system version will not be available and may cause problems.

MORE INFORMATION

In Visual Basic, edits to any foreign language must be made from that language's localized operating system because not all characters are valid and visible from every language. For example, some extended characters in French are valid leading bytes for DBCS, so they eat up the next character and create (or appear as) a invalid DBCS character.

Additionally, you can only enter DBCS characters from a DBCS version of Visual Basic on a DBCS localized operating system.

This essentially means that if you want to view or access double-byte characters by using the System font on a DBCS operating system, the font you choose on your U.S. operating system must be one that is available on a DBCS operating system. This limits the choices to "System" font and (for some localized versions) and "Terminal."

NOTE: There is also a difference in default font sizes on Japanese machines. The display system is different on Japanese machines. Therefore, some dialog text or button captions may appear cut off on DBCS displays if this is not accounted for at design time.