Consultor Eletrônico

Status: Unverified

GOAL:

How To modify code pages in Windows NT 4.0 DOS Shell

FIX:

In some situations it is necessary to modify the code page of the DOS environment to allow special characters to be seen or printed.

Open a CMD.exe session within Windows NT. The command which modifies code-page is mode. ( mode /? will give you a small syntax listing.)

mode <device> cp select=<code page>

In this example:

mode con: cp select=1252

will switch the session code page for the Console to code page 1252, which is a Latin-1 code page. The normal Console code page is 437 for DOS.

This is one part of preparing the environment.

mode <device> cp /status

will show information for each specific device what code page is selected.

Another test that this is successful in NT 4.0 is to use EDIT.com.

Once in EDIT and you are able to type some characters, try this:

1) press and hold the ALT key

2) while still holding the ALT key

3) on the Number Pad type a character in the upper 128 character range

4) release the ALT key

EDIT should now display the appropriate character from the defined code page.

To test this in the Progress Character Client:

1) edit the properties of this cmd.exe session by clicking in the
MS-DOS prompt image in the upper left corner of the window

2) select Properties

3) select the Font tab

4) change to Lucida Console (most machines will have this font)

5) launch pro or _progres

6) type: display chr(<the ascii character #>)

7) press F1

If this test generated the desired character, make a specific Icon for CMD.exe which will retain these settings for font and code page. Then it is possible to use that to launch your Progress Character Client.