Re: Euro Currency for UK

From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Fri Oct 10 2003 - 10:20:55 CST


----- Original Message -----
From: "Martin JD Green" <mjdgreen@rainbow4.demon.co.uk>
> This means that if I generate a new system (XP Professional) with all the
> latest updates but use UK as the standard locale and then try to switch to
> FRENCH/FRANCE I still get Francs! To get the locale to use euros I have to
> download this tool and run it while switched into the FRENCH/FRANCE
locale!

Microsoft has already provided the administrative Euro settings tool that
allows users to see the Euro in their corresponding prefered locale instead
of the legacy unit: with this tool, users can switch from one locale to the
other and have the Euro enabled/disabled.

In fact I just think that despite the UK is still not using the Euro, this
is only specific to the UK locale and should not apply to other locales,
even in a British localized system. So the default locale should be
date-based, knowing that, e.g., French/France is now Euro-enabled even in
UK: on such British system, a fr/FR user locale should see the EUR at first
place before FRF.

The limit exists on Windows 9x/ME where the automatic switch is not
available for standalone systems, as Win9x/ME only supports one locale at a
time (but it exists in domain-level group policies, when Win 9x/ME is used
as a workstation in a NT/2K/XP domain).

Note that this problem is absolutely not related to Unicode or to the
support of the Euro symbol in system fonts and for text codepage
conversions. If one applies a Windows-1252 update in a British system, it
should still assign and use the Euro symbol at position 0x80, no matter the
current user locale, provided that the user locale or any application uses
the Windows-1252 codepage, or the system uses this codepage to map its
"ANSI" codepage. And even in that case it should map to U+20AC for
conversion with Unicode (the UTF-16 transform used in all Win32 Unicode API,
or in UTF-8 and other related encoding schemes used on the web).

This assignment is not necessary for the DOS/OEM codepage which is most
often the CP-850 in Western Europe and does not contain the Euro character
(that cannot be seen in a command-line window, and will be displayed as a
"?" if entered on the keyboard).

IBM (not Microsoft) has defined some variants of the traditional DOS/OEM
codepages to allow display and input of the Euro symbol and character. They
are not used on Windows, except in text converter tools for NT/2K/XP (the
"c_*.nls" system files) such as in MIME-compliant applications like Internet
Explorer, Outlook, Outlook Express, or Office programs like Word that need
to convert correctly all texts (entered in non-Windows systems) to a Windows
codepage or to Unicode.



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