ProSoft Technology ProSoft i-View - Manual (Page 42)

Data Source Files ProSoft i-View ♦ Mobile Process Monitoring and Control Application
User Manual Version 2.0.2
Page 42 of 106 ProSoft Technology, Inc.
September 29, 2011
English and Western European Languages
By default ProSoft i-View assumes source files and Strings to conform to the
Windows Latin1 encoding. This is adequate for English and most Western
European languages such as German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and many
others. It does not require any particular setting. English and Western European
versions of Excel on Windows also use the Latin1 encoding for CSV files. On
Apple Mac computers you must save your CSVs as ‘csv-windows’ format to
conform to this encoding.
The Latin1 encoding is backward compatible with old plain ASCII, meaning that
ASCII characters share the same codes when represented in Latin1 encoding.
String Encoding for International Languages
If you use a language that can not be represented with the Latin1 encoding, you
are still able to import your files containing international characters in text
attributes. Additionally, international characters are supported in Strings and they
can be written and read back from PLCs without breaking their particular
encoding.
There are two ways for using international characters in ProSoft i-View:
Unicode UTF-16 encoding (16 bit multibyte encoding)
The UTF-16 encoding is capable for representing any character from virtually any
language in the wold. To make use of this encoding you can do the following:
Create a source file with texts in your language using your localized version of Excel
as usual.
Export the file as Unicode UTF-16 text.
Import the file as usual in ProSoft i-View. ProSoft i-View will automatically detect files
encoded as UTF-16. Unicode strings will be converted to UTF-8 before storing them
on PLC memory.
NOTE: Strings in source files containing UTF-16 characters will be converted
automatically to UTF-8 regardless of the Explicit Encoding specified on the
source file as defined in the next sub heading. Any Explicit string Encoding given
in a source file will be thus ignored if the file was already UTF-16 encoded.