Support for high ASCII and Unicode?

[aderusha]

I'm trying to figure out how to get SS to display extended character sets and am not 100% sure that I'm even doing this right. I'm running under Terminal on Windows 11 and I note that SS does not seem to be able to render anything apart from the first 127 chars of ASCII character set. High ASCII block drawing chars and UTF-8 don't seem to be working correctly.

Here's some output as it appears in PuTTY, utilizing CaskaydiaCove Nerd Font Mono which should be a reasonably-complete character set:

Note that °F, µg/m³, and m/s² all render correctly here

Here's an example of similar output utilizing SS.exe in Windows Terminal, again with CaskaydiaCove Nerd Font Mono. Note the text being sent as 66.20000 °F renders as 66.20000 ??F in SS. Other not-7-bit-ASCII chars all similarly render as ??.

Now I hit Ctrl+X to exit SS.exe, and in the same terminal session I copy/paste from PuTTY to spit output back to the screen.

This suggests that Windows Terminal is able to correctly display these glyphs when asked to do so.

[fasteddy516]

First of all, thank you for taking the time to do all of that testing and generate those screenshots and detailed descriptions, it is sincerely appreciated!

You are absolutely correct - Windows Terminal appears to have no problem handling the full unicode character set so long as the selected font has the required glyphs. I did some digging, and the fix for SimplySerial is twofold:

1) The application has to be configured to output in UTF8 instead of ASCII. This is the easy part; all I have to do is add a single line of code: Console.OutputEncoding = System.Text.Encoding.UTF8. I have already tested this and it works.

2) Incoming serial data has to be interpreted as UTF-8. This is the harder part, and where my relative inexperience with .NET and C# shows; I'll have to figure out how to interpret the incoming stream of data as variable-length unicode characters rather than just a sequence of bytes.

I'll try to work on it over the next day or two and let you know when I've got a solution.

[fasteddy516]

I've implemented unicode support (and a few other small items) and published a beta version of SimplySerial here. Please give it a try when you have a chance and let me know if you have any issues. I'll publish it as a stable release assuming there are no problems.

Thanks again for the report and suggestion - I never realized how much I was missing unicode support until now! ;)

[aderusha]

My brother that worked AWESOME! Everything is gravy now, and holy cow what a fast fix. I really love this tool, thanks for the continued development and unicode support!