character bleed on Asian screens

[tweedsmuir]

If this is not an appropriate place to ask--can anyone direct me?

Trying to find out why two customers' computers, one in Japan one in Malaysia, display our fixed screens with characters bleeding off to right and bottom. Text screens display OK. No display problems on hundreds of other computers across the world, including some in Asia.

One customer has 3 character sets, 2 of them Asian, on his computer. Ay my suggestion, he tried setting English as default language; didn't work.

Thanks,

tweedsmuir

[Salem]

The first thing to suggest would be to press "print screen" to take a snapshot of the entire desktop, and then save the result as a PNG file (using mspaint).

This is to tell whether it's a problem with the physical display device (the same corruption isn't seen in the saved file), or the display driver really is drawing corrupted pixels.

Are these customers using "wide-screen" displays which may have non-standard DPI resolutions (I've read your other thread).

Do both customers report similar problems with any other s/w package, or just yours?

Do both customers use the same OS / graphics card ?
Are they running with the latest patches from the graphics card manufacturers, or some older version.

[tweedsmuir]

Thanks much for the comeback, Salem. As far as I know my two problem posts are unrelated--one involves Vista only and an internal function; the character-bleed is (so far) in XP only on 2 machines in Asia.

One of the customers mentioned that he has a wide-screen display. Both checked dpi and confirmed 96--no custom dpi's. (Normally, the software silently adjusts to both screen-width and 96/120 dpi settings after interrogating the local computer, and we've had no complaints about that.) One customer says he hasn't had similar problems with other software, so it's probably our programming at fault. If it were graphics card/patches problems or wide-screen problems, I'd expect other, non-Asian customers to have them, as well, but none have shown up on over 500 other installations in 44 states and 34 foreign countries.

We haven't gotten full-screen dumps, but what they've sent is striking: our preprogrammed, fixed-size, fixed-text (using Windows's System font), Help-type screens show their headers & frames perfectly ok; all the menu bars are fine; output screens containing variable text sent by the software are all ok. The exception is only in the fixed text preprogrammed into the fixed-size Help-type screens--no distortion of the screens, no screen size changes, headers as expected; just the fixed text contents bleeding past the frame margins bottom and right. Most just bleed, or cut off, right; some have missing lines of text at bottom.

It's evidently a problem with the character sizes the computer puts into the fixed-size screens. But what?

Bummer. There's gotta be someone among the d-web quarter million who knows about this. What we don't know is whether it's a Programming 101 mistake or a sinister plot by large corporations to force purchases of their hardware. . . .

tweedsmuir