To add a language to your system, you need to edit your PCBML.DAT file (PCBSetup > File Locations > Configuration Files). By default, your file should look like the following:

    Language             Extension  Country  CodePage  Yes  No

————————- ——— ——- ——– — –

English (Default)                                         Y    N

If you want to add the French language to your system, you would press ALT-I to insert a new line. The following describes each of the fields in this file:

Keeping all of the previous information in mind, your entry for the French language might look like the following:

    
      Language             Extension  Country  CodePage  Yes  No
-------------------------  ---------  -------  --------  ---  --
English (Default)                                         Y    N
French                        FRE       033      850      O    N

PCBoard has the ability to extract the dates, thousands separator, and upper/lower case information from COUNTRY.SYS you can install with your operating system (DOS or OS/2). These changes will take effect when a language is chosen which selects a different country code.
NOTE: If a user is on remotely, your status line will continue to use the default information as specified in your computer setup. That way, a user could be logged in, using the French language, but you, the SysOp, would continue to see the dates and numbers displayed as you are used to seeing them.

Dates will be displayed and entered using the country information specified by the language. For example, the United States uses the mmddyy format, where most European countries use the ddmmyy format for specifying dates.
This all depends on the information provided by COUNTRY.SYS.

If you are using a country which specifies dates in a format other than mmddyy, you will need to modify some of the records in the PCBTEXT file for the language. In particular, you will need to modify records 72, 266, and 688 because they ask the user to enter the date in mmddyy format.

As with the dates, PCBoard will be able to decide if the language specified needs to use the comma or the period for the thousands separator. For example, in the United States, a number could be displayed as 1,024,000 whereas with periods it would be displayed as 1.024.000.

In addition to reading the date and number information from COUNTRY.SYS, PCBoard can also determine what the proper capitalized and lower case characters are for a particular language. PCBoard will use this information throughout the system so users can enter responses in the syntax that they are most familiar with.

For PCBoard to support internationalization of dates, thousands separator and capitalization you must have COUNTRY.SYS installed on your system
COUNTRY.SYS should come with your operating system including the instructions on how to install it in your system. The following sections shows you samples of how to install COUNTRY.SYS in both DOS and OS/2.

In your CONFIG.SYS file, add:

COUNTRY=001,437,C:\DOS\COUNTRY.SYS

This example shows an entry for the United States. By referring to your operating system manual, you should be able to see that 001 is the country number, 437 is the code page number to use, and the last parameter is the location of your COUNTRY.SYS file.

The configuration for OS/2 is quite similar to the configuration for DOS machines. You need to add the following line to your CONFIG.SYS file:

COUNTRY=001,C:\OS2\SYSTEM\COUNTRY.SYS

This example also shows you the configuration as it would appear for the United States. As you can tell, you need to only enter the country number and the location of your COUNTRY.SYS file.

The code-page information that you specify in PCBML.DAT gives PCBoard the ability to change the font used by the display adapter whenever a caller changes languages. The font change only shows up on the local screen and then only when it is a local login. In addition, you must have an EGA/VGA adapter in order to setup the ability to change fonts.

If you will recall, the previous section discussed how to add the French language to your system. The examples, for this section will revolve around installing French on your system as well.

In your CONFIG.SYS, add the following:

DEVICE=C:\DOS\DISPLAY.SYS CON=(EGA,437,2)

In your AUTOEXEC.BAT, add these lines:

NLSFUNC
MODE CON: CP PREPARE=((437 850) C:\DOS\EGA.CPI)

For additional information on DISPLAY.SYS, NLSFUNC, and MODE please refer to your DOS manual.

If you are running multiple nodes under DESQview, you should be aware that the font support is a little unpredictable in that the font changes in one node may show up in another node's display instead. In addition, Microsoft Windows will not show the font change, unless you are running in a full-screen window.

In your CONFIG.SYS add the following:

CODEPAGE=437,850

OS/2 does a good job of displaying fonts. You can easily have two separate windows using two different fonts.

For additional information on using the CODEPAGE line in your CONFIG.SYS, please refer to your OS/2 manual.

The PCBTEXT file contains almost all of the text that is written to the caller log files. If you have several languages available on your system, you may find it difficult to interpret the information written to the caller log because it would be written in the language chosen by the user.

To help ease the reading of the log files, PCBoard will use the entries from the default PCBTEXT file (the one with no file extension) when writing to the log files. This means all of the entries will be the same for your callers no matter what language they select.