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skauert Offline OP
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Hi guys.

I have recently upgraded from 6.3 to 7.25 in an effort to make use of full UTF-8 support. However, I noticed that with this version, there is no way that I can get my client to render Japanese in the way that it used to with 6.3. I've used Verdana size 9 for all my messaging needs for many years now, and only now has it changed for the worse.

Following is a screenshot that outlines what I mean:

http://i.imgur.com/dqMYY.png

The messages are being sent from two separate clients, one being my old 6.3 client and the other being my new 7.25 client. As you can see, normal text is rendered fine in both, but only my old client renders the japanese text as I would expect it to.

I apologize if this is not a bug, a known bug, or otherwise a "feature" of the current mIRC. I would however appreciate any feedback that would help towards alleviating this problem. Unfortunately changing fonts is out of the question, as I've become very used to reading this font over the years. If it proves to be unfixable, I'll probably just have to stick to an older version of mIRC.

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Hoopy frood
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Hoopy frood
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mIRC v6.3 was released in 2007, over five years ago, and there have been hundreds of changes and fixes since then, so it is difficult to say why that has changed. That said, I recall that there was a bug in older versions that caused some characters to be displayed in a font slightly larger than the rest of the text in some contexts, which was fixed in subsequent versions. Please note that you should not be using mIRC v6.3, since it has known remote exploits. You should at the very least be using mIRC v6.35.

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skauert Offline OP
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Thanks for the swift response, Khaled!

I experimented a bit with the different versions, and I found that enabling font linking causes the font to become small when rendering japanese text. In version 7.25, I believe there is no option to disable this, which in turn causes this to happen.

Using 6.35 is fine, because I can disable font linking there. Do you think there will be an option to disable font linking in the current generation of mIRC clients, or is it out of your control due to a new design or something similar?

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Hoopy frood
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Hoopy frood
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The font linking feature is enabled by default now as this ensures that all characters are displayed correctly. It can no longer be turned off in newer versions of mIRC.

That said, I tested the display of Japanese characters in both v6.35 and v7.25 under XP, using both FixedSys and Verdana as the set font, and they both appeared the same. I have not had a chance to test under Windows 7 yet.

Font linking is dependent on the fonts installed on your system. The font linking method in mIRC should use the set font as the default and will only try another font if characters are not supported by it.

In the case of Verdana, which does not support Japanese characters, it looks like Windows is performing the font linking itself (using a particular font) when "font linking" is disabled in mIRC. When "font linking" is enabled in mIRC, mIRC searches the following fonts in this order to find character support: Microsoft Sans Serif, Arial Unicode MS, Tahoma, Arial, Lucida Sans Unicode, Code2000, Fixedsys Excelsior 3.01.

I plan to change the way mIRC displays text in future to use Windows to perform the font-linking instead of its own routines (although that may have side-effects, such as not displaying older fonts properly) which may resolve issues like this.

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skauert Offline OP
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That explains a few things. Thanks for the confirmation. smile I'll be looking out for any change concerning this issue in future mIRC versions.

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Hoopy frood
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On a default win7 installation, only ms sans serif, tahoma, arial, and lucida sans unicode are available, I came across the code point 127850 which is a cookie, none of these available fonts can display it so I get a block.
Is it possible to add some fonts to the list of font used for font linking? To get more of these higher code point to be displayed correctly?
I tried to look at which font to add but couldn't really came up with something, but the font "segoe UI symbol" does display the cookie, so maybe that one, or maybe it's possible for you to install fixedsys excelsior 3.01 for us when we install mIRC?


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