Encoding and Fonts in WinCC OA

Encoding in WinCC OA

WinCC OA supports single byte and multi byte encoding.

Single byte encoding

In WinCC OA single byte encoding is represented using the ISO-8859-n encoding. The ISO-8859-n encoding consists of 15 different parts (1 up to 16; 12 has been excluded). Each character is represented using a single byte and therefore different character sets are used for each ISO encoding part, e.g. ISO-8859-1 only supports characters from the Western European languages. This limitation leads to an incompatibility between the different ISO encodings and errors will occur when displaying different character sets. See also: Important notes

As of the version 3.20 ISO projects cannot be created anymore. Create UTF-8 projects instead.

Multi byte encoding

In different languages characters are encoded differently. Depending on the language and the individual character a different number of bytes is used for encoding. This is called multi-byte encoding.

Each character or letter has its own language-specific numeric equivalent in multi-byte coding and needs between 1 and 4 bytes. Well-known multi-byte encoding supported by WinCC OA are UTF-8 (Up to 4 Bytes), BIG5 (2 Bytes) and GB2312 (2 Bytes).

Please refer to list with all available languages for more detailed information about the languages and coding types supported by WinCC OA:

When opening a user interface in Windows, the file names and paths defined in the graphics editor (GEDI) using unicode coding are transferred into multi-byte encoding which has been defined in the regional and language options. (Under Windows XP: Start > Settings > Control panel > Regional and language options > Select the menu tab "advanced" in the popup dialog > Select a languages in the list to match the language version of the non-Unicode programs > then click on "OK"). For example, when English is selected, then Russian characters (Cyrillic letters) cannot be transferred using the English coding. If you would like to create file names in Russian in GEDI, you will have to select "Russian" in the settings mentioned above. Under Windows WinCC OA only supports files with file names coded in the language defined in the regional and language options.

We recommend that you only use characters from 7 bit-ASCII character set for file names.

Fonts

Internally all texts in WinCC OA are handled as multi-byte character texts. As a result, all characters which are supported by both "Locale" and the selected font can be used.

Please make sure that the fonts containing the desired characters are installed!