Windows and UTF-8 characters. Discovered ConsoleZ

[Ph Vouters]

Dear Windows user,

I wished to run a Calendars Linux C code onto Windows. This C code displays on the terminal ASCII/Iranian/Arabic/Hebrew/Chinese/Japanese/Hindu characters in UTF-8 encoding. I thus discovered ConsoleZ while digging onto Internet. ConsoleZ is a GPL licensed software. It is purely genial and simple to use.

It lays over any Windows running shell (CMD, Cygwin/MinGW bash, PowerShell) and only deals with terminal I/Os. UTF-8 terminal I/Os is a weak Microsoft point. The real problem I have been facing was to select the appropriate font which would be accepted.

See the Windows ConsoleZ and Linux outputs I get running my code. Everything can be viewed at http://vouters.dyndns.org/tima/Linux-Calendars-Internationalizing_dates.html

So if you have I18N problems displaying characters, may I warmly recommend you ConsoleZ on Windows.

Yours truly,

Philippe

[Ph Vouters]

I was indeed right to warmly recommend you ConsoleZ software (https://github.com/cbucher/console/wiki/Downloads). The more I use it for my I18N date formatting purpose, the more I enjoy it. ConsoleZ along with Courier New as the font is the only terminal I know on both Linux and Windows able to correctly handle any combination of left-to-right and right-to-left UTF-8 outputs. ConsoleZ as a terminal perfectly fits the Islamic, Persian, Hebrew and Chinese/Japanese/Korean characters UTF-8 characters sets as soon as terminal outputs are involved. I am not aware of any other such powerful and simple terminal. The perfect thing it does is that you can use any of the pure Windows shells (CMD and PowerShell) as well as any Linux-aware shells (bash, others offered by Windows/MinGW or Windows/Cygwin).

I would really dream for ConsoleZ to be ported to Linux.

Yours truly,

Philippe