Use of Chinese characters within Vensim/Venapp

[Dave]

We have developed a large venapp interface recently. We are interested in providing a version in Chinese! We already have a design to select appropriate labels in the Venapp forms depending on the language flag. End users will only interact with Venapp forms with some embedded custom graphs and tables. No visibility to the stock flow diagram is planned although string variables from the model file are used.

I guess there are 2 routes possible
* Using a Chinese character set
* Using western characters (i.e Pinyin lauguage)

We can cover the second but has any one attempted the former? I am looking for feedback on Vensim's langauge support.

Any comments gratefully received.

Dave

[bob@vensim.com]

Hi David,

Don't use PinYin - it will not be intelligible to Chinese people.

You should not have any problem using Chinese but you will need a computer with Chinese Windows (or some other form of Chinese character support) to interact with and edit the Venapp - make sure you match the Chinese to your target audience Taiwan and Mainland China use different encoding systems.

[Edited on 6-7-2004 by bob@vensim.com]

[Dave]

Thanks a lot for this advice - I was told that business people may understand Pinyin but if so then English was probably equally as relevant given client is a multinational.

I will explore your suggestion on our PC test machines.