Unicode Owner Draw Button Control

• Download demo project - 25.5 Kb
• Download source - 3.53 Kb

Introduction

When I was writing an application for an Arabic customer in C++, I noticed that the buttons/labels in my CDialog did not understand my Arabic text. This class allows you to write any Unicode text in the button control. (And you can use it as a direction for making the same for a static label, for instance).

Background

This article started as a simple project to display Arabic text from a MySQL database / file on images/dialogs. I noticed that when you write Unicode characters into the developer environment directly, you need to convert it to Unicode first. That's is why I make use of the function MultiByteToWideChar in the sample application.

Using the code

The implementation of the CUniButton is done in the following steps:

1. Add a button to your dialog and set the Owner-Draw property to True.
2. Add a member variable for your button and change CButton to CUniButton.

   Change:

       CButton m_button1;

   to:

       CUniButton m_button1;

3. Add the UniButton header file into your Dialog header:

   #include "unibutton.h"

To change text/font/reading order, use the following:

    m_button1.SetText(L"Unicode text goes here");
    m_button1.SetRTL(0);//no right to left
    m_button1.SetFont("Tahoma",30);

For Arabic, set the RTL to True:

Add the Usp10.lib library to your project dependencies.

The following functions are implemented:

• void SetHilightColors (COLORREF hilight,COLORREF hilightText);
• void SetNormalColors (COLORREF clrBkgnd,COLORREF clrText);
• void SetText(WCHAR *szText);
• void SetRTL(int bRTL);
• void SetDefaultSSAFlags(DWORD dwFlags);
• void SetFont(char *szFaceName, int height);
• void SetHorizontalAlignment(_AlignHorz hAlign);
• void SetVerticalAlignment(_AlignVert vAlign);

Points of Interest

I'm just starting to learn how to use Unicode characters in projects. It is possible that I forgot to implement some important features. If so, you probably want to modify the functions: PlotTXTUnicode and/or CalcTXTUnicode.

History

• Version 1.0: 25/09/2005