Special and non-latin characters support comes to PACE Suite

Most of the application packaging community is well aware that Windows Installers store names of files, registry entries and other resources to the database tables as string values. The Code Page of a database defines how to encode these string values.

If you manually set the right Code Page prior to adding any localization information, everything works fine. However, if you create a multi-language package and try to put, for instance, two files with extended characters of different languages into a single package, you will run into a problem. Neither neutral nor language specific like 1256 (ANSI – Arabic) Code Page cannot be used in this case, giving headaches to packagers working in countries were languages have non-latin characters (in other words, most of the world!)

The latest PACE Suite 5.3.2 solves this issue and builds and saves all MSI packages with the UTF-8 code page of a database. A package with this encoding is capable of installing resources with extended characters of different languages in the titles. You no longer need to set the right Code Page for every package manually.

Please note that UTF-7 and UTF-8 are not officially supported in MSI, because sometimes issues occur in the user interface during installation and de-installation. It all depends on the font you are going to use.