HOWTO: Use international languages with Graphics Processor in ASP

Description

Variety of languages sometimes causes problems when we deal with text drawing. Everything may work ok, until you try to draw a string which contains non-english symbols, especially such complex characters as Japanise, Arabic, Chinese and so on. For example you write an application in ASP and try to draw such characters you can receive the following:



instead of:



Reason

ASP file has incorrect encoding. That's why wrong symbols are passed to the Graphics Processor and it cannot draw it correctly.

Solution

To make Graphics Processor draw such symbols correctly, you should set right encoding to the file which contains the script.

Let's assume that we have draw text via the following code:



Replace strText variable value into some text on necessary language, something like this:



As the file contains non-English characters, we should specify the text encoding in order it could be read correctly. For example we could use UTF-8 (UTF-16 is not supported in ASP). To use UTF-8 you should do two things:

1. Specify in the beginning of ASP page that you are going to use this encoding. To do it, just insert the following string in the beginning of the ASP page:



2. Save ASP file using UTF-8 encoding. Note, you should select UTF-8 encoding with signature. If you work in Visual Studio .NET you can specify the encoding in the following way:



and then



After that you can save file as usual, it will be saved using right encoding.

You can also open encoding options dialog directly from Save dialog:



If you edit the file in Notepad, you can just select UTF-8 encoding in Save dialog: