Elaboration of the 0.31.1 release
C K Wu
1. 0.31.1 is mainly on translations and internationalisation of the
CK-ERP codebase.
2. The embedded tc_pdf library works fine with English display.
However, for non-English, especially non-alphabetic, languages, proper
pdf output depends on the availability of an adequate font. At least
with Chinese pdf output, there are a lot of '?' characters being
displayed, because the embedded Chinese font is just not large enough.
Hence, please consider CK-ERP's pdf output facility to be still
non-operational for non-English languages.
3. Because mbstring() functions are not being used in the current
CK-ERP codebase, some logical errors will occur when processing
non-ascii, especially non-English double-byte-character, string data.
Previously, it was indicated that php 6 will employ UTF-16 when handling
unicode data (which would most likely involve some changes to the
mbstring() design), so the decision was to delay the rectification of
this problem to sometimes, post-php6. Now that UTF-16 had been
abandoned and php 5.4 was released instead, the whole thing would have
to be re-visited and solution devised. At the same time, before the
release of 0.31.1, I have checked the effect of the missing mbstring(),
it mostly boils down to wrong string character count, eg, if you have a
Chinese character string of XXXXXX, it may generate an error message,
saying something like, maximum string length of 10 exceeded. While the
character count of the string should be 6, the byte count is 12. The
byte count is what the error message is based on. If you are working
with non-English double-byte language data, the temporary workaround is
to keep the string character length to less than half of the maximum.
4. mysqli and sqlite3 support had been added to 0.31.1 . However, not
all middlewares have added mysqli and sqlite3 support themselves, as
yet. Hence, not all (middleware + CK-ERP) connectors have activated the
(mysqli,sqlite3) support feature. If you come across a case where the
support should have been activated, but not been done so, please send a
posting to this discussion group. I'll try to devise a patch to solve
the problem.
Best Regards,
CK