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Diam0nd Offline OP
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I tried using v7 yesterday, and well, it doesn't show anything other than English properly. The conversations i mean. It only shows gibberish. I tried chat rooms with japanese, german, french and russian. I changed my system's local before i tried each language. Didn't help.

I remember in the old mirc, if i go to VIEW > FONTS, there was an option to change active font and it's encoding. In v7 it's gone, but it seems that correct encoding is displayed in the sample part of the dialog. I understand that maybe the option is gone since v7 is Unicode, but still: fact of the matter is that international fonts do not display correctly frown

Or maybe I'm doing smth wrong? Any suggestions?


P.S. I'm running Win7 x64 by the way.


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Hoopy frood
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It works fine so long as the users are using Unicode. It's possible they aren't, though. In such a case, you will need to tell them to start using Unicode, for the sake of newer clients.

mIRC 7.x is intentionally only compatible with Unicode and not the old Windows regional codepages of the past. The old regional charsets were complex to support and added a lot of code to mIRC that made it a lot harder to maintain. The new Unicode codebase does not mean it does not support international characters-- in fact, quite the opposite. Unicode has 65535 (technically more) characters to ASCII's 256. It supports just about every regional script out there without having to change to a specific region. Therefore when people are using Unicode, they can have conversations in French, German, Japanese, Russian and English at the same time, in the same window, without changing their locale. Once other clients (and users) start adopting Unicode, IRC will be a much better place. mIRC is already taking steps to make this possible, and most other IRC clients already support Unicode out of the box, so the transition might take a little bit of time, but it should go smoothly once mIRC is out of beta.

It's actually more likely that the clients that show gibberish are using an older version of mIRC without Unicode enabled. You should tell those users to enable Unicode (mIRC 6.17+ supports Unicode) and then you will be able to see what they write too.


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Hoopy frood
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As mentioned above, this is because mIRC is now a Unicode application and will only send and receive UTF-8 encoded text. The purpose is to, ideally, make IRC as a whole non-reliant on codepages, so that everyone will be able to view all characters in all languages. In older versions of mIRC, every user had to manually configure each of their channel/query windows with a specific font and codepage to display one particular language, and this only worked for that language, so if someone new joined the channel, or someone joined that channel and spoke a different language, text would appear as garbage to them and to others. The use of UTF-8 means that none of that is necessary any more. Everyone on IRC will be able to read everyone else's text, regardless of language, without any fiddling or confguring codepages. You can find discussions on this issue here, here and here.

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Diam0nd Offline OP
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Originally Posted By: Khaled
As mentioned above, this is because mIRC is now a Unicode application and will only send and receive UTF-8 encoded text. The purpose is to, ideally, make IRC as a whole non-reliant on codepages, so that everyone will be able to view all characters in all languages. In older versions of mIRC, every user had to manually configure each of their channel/query windows with a specific font and codepage to display one particular language, and this only worked for that language, so if someone new joined the channel, or someone joined that channel and spoke a different language, text would appear as garbage to them and to others. The use of UTF-8 means that none of that is necessary any more. Everyone on IRC will be able to read everyone else's text, regardless of language, without any fiddling or confguring codepages. You can find discussions on this issue here, here and here.

Khaled and argv0, first off, thank you both so much for the reply!

Secondly, I know what Unicode means and what kind of advantages it carries over non-unicode communication. BUT I guess simply expected some kind of backward comparability from v7, meaning that it will communicate in Unicode, BUT it will be able to "understand" older, non-unicode versions.

And the reason is simple, really, I can use the all-new v7 as much as I want to, but the thing is that 90% of the people are still going to use v6 for a long time to come. And what that means FOR ME is that I will not be able to see what all those people are saying, meaning I HAVE TO switch back to latest v6 frown

Is there any work-around here? I mean, to keep using v7 but make it "understand" older clients? Because I love all the new stuff that v7 has to offer, but the Unicode thing is simply killing it at the very root (since communicating is mIRC's job 1).


But again, guys, thank you so much for all the info and your replies!


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Hoopy frood
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Although some people use older versions due to scripts or simply not wanting to take the time to upgrade, I don't think you'll see anywhere near 90% who are on 6.35 or under within a week of mIRC 7 being released. I'd be willing to bet that at least 75% of mIRC users will upgrade. And with the changes to unicode that can cause the issues you mentioned, that may increase the percentage who upgrade even more.

If you're on channels that use codepages in order to communicate, I'd recommend trying to get everyone to agree to upgrade to mIRC 7 or to use another client that offers unicode. Other than script issues, there's really no reason not to upgrade.


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Hoopy frood
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They don't even need to upgrade. Remember that mIRC supports Unicode from 6.17 onwards, so it's likely the client they are using already CAN use Unicode to communicate. You simply need to convince them to enable it. That should be easier than telling them to upgrade.

Backwards compatibility would be nice, but unfortunately it would defeat the purpose of moving to Unicode. As I mentioned, 6.x "supported" Unicode, but it only did so good of a job. Many of the issues related to Unicode breaking down had to do with the exact legacy code you're talking about. This is why Khaled chose to streamline mIRC and remove a large amount of complexity in the data handling and display routines. This will allow mIRC to work better with Unicode, which is where we're all headed anyway. Basically, all that legacy code was making it impossible for mIRC to move forward and properly support Unicode. An mIRC 7.x with Unicode and the legacy encoding support would just be an mIRC 6.x, because that's exactly where we were before we started this process.

That said, it should be possible in the near future (upcoming betas or next release at worst) to script this kind of backwards compatibility encoding support with the new /raw -n functionality that was added in 7.03. It might be a little more complex because it has to be scripted, but eventually I'm sure someone will write such a script, once all the loose ends are tied up.


- argv[0] on EFnet #mIRC
- "Life is a pointer to an integer without a cast"

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