Settings for Non-Unicode Programs

Owned by Kaitlin Bagley
Last updated: Jul 18, 2012Version comment
1 min read

While it is always good to use Unicode enabled programs, that is not always possible. Many older programs or programs written by independent foreign programmers tend to not be Unicode compliant.

The most obvious sign that you are not using a Unicode-enabled program is that all of the menus and dialog boxes that would normally appear in a foreign language are not displaying correctly.

Fortunately, Windows XP has a setting that usually helps with this. You can set your Windows to render all non-Unicode programs in a particular encoding. This setting is Windows account specific (meaning that you can have different settings for different accounts on Windows), and applies to all non-Unicode programs you have installed. If you use non-Unicode programs in many different languages, you will need to change this setting each time you choose a different program.

To set the encoding for you non-Unicode programs:

  1. Go to Regional and Language Options
  2. Click on the Advanced tab
  3. In the top section, you can set the language for your non-Unicode programs
  4. Set the language to the language you need to use