# EPOC help project localisation issues

## Contents

- Overview
- Localisation issues

## Overview

There are several `aleppo` localisation issues/limitations of which authors should be aware. These are discussed in the following paragraphs.

## Localisation issues

Firstly, the EPOC help database has traditionally used the CP1252 character set. This set can display all of the characters used in most European languages, but cannot be used to represent all of the characters which appear in other languages. While future releases of EPOC are expected to have support for the much larger 16 bit Unicode character set, users should be aware that:

- Systems based on current and previous EPOC releases will not accurately display the characters.
- Only 8 bit customisation files can be processed by `aleppo`. The main implication of this is that the text in `tipeffects`, `noteffects` and `importanteffects` cannot be in a far eastern language, e.g. Japanese. This is because Japanese has more characters than can be represented in an 8 bit character set. For the customisation file format see Customisation files.
- The customisation file could use a definition for the body text of `<bodystyle fontstyle=sansserif size=10>`. This makes perfect sense for English characters, however it is not clear how `aleppo` should interpret a far-eastern character as san serif.