Displaying national characters correctly

Note: The Z and I Emulator for Web Troubleshooting Guide cites several examples of problems associated with displaying national characters. Many of these problems are related to JVM levels and can be solved by upgrading to a later version. For more information about checking for and upgrading your level of JVM, refer to the Java 1 and Java 2 checklists in the Download and client troubleshooting checklist.

Installing and configuring the appropriate font and keyboard Cannot use IBM Worldtype fonts in Z and I Emulator for Web display sessions Editing the font.properties files to display characters correctly Code page conversion for FTP sessions

Installing and configuring the appropriate font and keyboard

For characters to be displayed correctly, you must and install and configure the appropriate font and keyboard layout for the selected host code page. For example, if the code page selected in the session profile is Greek code page 737, but you have not configured the system to use an appropriate Greek font and keyboard layout, then you will not be able to type or view all the Greek characters.

Cannot use IBM Worldtype fonts in Z and I Emulator for Web display sessions

If you cannot use IBM WorldType fonts on a Z and I Emulator for Web display session, you may need to update the font.properties.<locale> file. Several font.properties files are bundled with the Java 2 SDK. You can find these files in the directory ../lib, which is located beneath the directory where Java is installed. Modify the file so that the monospaced WorldType font is the highest priority.

The following is an example for Traditional Chinese:


monospaced.0=Monotype Sans Duospace WT TC
monospaced.1=Courier New
monospaced.2=\u7d30\u660e\u9ad4,CHINESEBIG5_CHARSET
monospaced.3=Lucida Sans Typewriter Regular
monospaced.4=Lucida Sans Regular

Editing the font.properties files to display characters correctly

Even though Z and I Emulator for Web is designed to support many national languages, sometimes characters are displayed as boxes or question marks on the screen. In order to see those characters correctly, you need to have the appropriate font installed, and your font.properties file has to be modified to recognize this font. The Microsoft JVM, which is the default Java environment for Internet Explorer, does not recognize font.properties files.

To modify the font.properties file, take one or both of the following steps:

  • Reuse the font.properties file from some other Java implementation. Some Java implementations includes more font.properties files than others. If you can find the font.properties file for your locale, you may be able to reuse it.

    Z and I Emulator for Web contains the set of font.properties files in IBM JRE for Windows under the zieweb\samples\fonts\win32 directory. Each file has a unique file extension that consists of two alphabetical characters, such as "ko" for Korean. Refer to Alphabetical list of two-letter language codes at https://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/php/code_list.php for the list of two-letter language codes.

    Note: If you are running Z and I Emulator for Web on a Windows platform, you may be able to see the characters correctly just by copying it to the appropriate directory of your JRE.

  • Reuse the font.properties file for other languages in your JRE. If you are using a European language, you may be able to reuse a font.properties file for another language just by replacing some statements mechanically.

    For example, if you are using Netscape 4 on the AIX platform and want to reuse font.properties.ru (for Russian) for a Greek environment, you can take the following steps:

    1. Rename font.properties.ru to font.properties.el.
    2. Open the font.properites.el file in a text editor.
    3. Change all occurrences of 'iso8859-5' to 'iso8859-7'.
    4. Change all occurrences of '8859_5' to '8859_7'.
    5. Save the changed file.

    These steps change the code page from Cyrillic to Greek. ISO8859-x is an code page specified by ISO and mostly used on Unix platforms.

    Use the following table as a reference on standard code pages used in your language environment.

    ISO Windows Description
    8859-1 1252 Latin-1
    8859-2 1250 Latin-2 (Central Europe)
    8859-4 1257 Baltic Rim
    8859-5 1251 Cryllic
    8859-6 1256 Arabic
    8859-7 1253 Greek
    8859-8 1255 Hebrew
    8859-9 1254 Latin-5 (Turkish)

For more information about fonts and font.properties files, see the following documentation:

Code page conversion for FTP sessions

The FTP Protocol logic assumes that ASCII communication between the host FTP server and client FTP session will occur in a code page compatible with the client.