WinAudit comes in so-called ANSI and Unicode versions. The former displays a limited character set and runs on personal computers based on Windows® 95 and newer. The Unicode version can display the characters used by more complex writing scripts such as Chinese and Japanese. This version requires Windows® NT4 or better and is identifiable by the Unicode caption on the title bar or by viewing the Build setting via Help and About WinAudit from the menu.

For the purposes of this note, Unicode is the default variant used by Windows® which is termed UTF-16 Little Endian. It is the encoding option entitled 'Unicode' available when saving a document using Notepad.

The ANSI and Unicode versions are named WinAudit.exe and WinAuditu.exe respectively. Note, to view correctly characters from the univeral alphabet (Unicode) you may need to set an appropriate font. For example, the Courier font may not display Cyrillic characters correctly. You can set it by selecting Edit then Font from the menu.

WinAudit provides typical document like functionality, such as text searching and print previewing. Searching for Right-to-Left text such as Hebrew or Arabic is supported. However, WinAudit it is not a Unicode word processor and as such it is not designed to handle the more complex aspects of international character presentation such as vertically drawn script. Documents are in a web-page format with the programme computing the position of each word so it can make lines then paragraphs. Some writing scripts do not have spaces between words, so it is possible that a body of text will be displayed as a single long line. Given the tabulated nature of the report content, this is not expected to occur often.

Supported

User Interface Translation

The user interface, such as menus and buttons, can be translated into Unicode characters. Save the language file WinAudit_Lang.txt in Unicode format so that the text is rendered correctly.

Save Audit Result

The audit report can be saved in Unicode text, web page (HTML) and Extended Markup Language (XML), these formats will preserve Unicode characters.

Clipboard (Select/Copy)

You can copy Unicode text and HTML on the to clipboard for pasting into other Unicode compatible applications.

Command Line

Unicode characters can be used on the command line for file paths and arguments. A notable exception is the creation of PDF documents in which case only ANSI is accepted.

Log File

Logging in both ANSI and Unicode are supported by both ANSI and Unicode versions of WinAudit. If a log file already exists, WinAudit will preserve that encoding. For example, if you create a log file with the Unicode version of WinAudit then use an ANSI version, it will append the log entries in Unicode.

Database

WinAudit can export Unicode characters to a database. Data Source Names (DSN) and user credentials can also be in Unicode. Note, the small configuration file WinAudit.ini saves the DSN and username in ANSI only. This information will be lost if these are in Unicode.

Important: Tests using various databases and ODBC drivers sometimes resulted in programme instability. It is strongly advised to use production quality ODBC drivers and to verify that all your software is Unicode compatible. Also, check that the database is allocating the correct number of bytes for Unicode characters. WinAudit does not transform (e.g. UTF-8) Unicode data to make it ANSI backwards compatible. No problems were observed exporting data to Microsoft® Access 2000 or Microsoft® SQL Server 2005. This does not mean that the programme's export algorithm of Unicode characters is error free.

Partial or Workaround

CHM

Compiled Html documents do not fully support Unicode. The underlying table of contents is an ANSI encoded html document. The contents (audit report) are UTF-8 encoded and should render correctly.

PDF

PDF documents are not saved in Unicode format. However, a suffciently large range of character sets is available to suit most needs. Note, for a PDF viewer to correctly display these characters, the computer will still need to have the required fonts installed.

Information such as the document's title, author and bookmarks are in ANSI only. This also applies to any password entered and the file path used to save the document.

E-Mail

The e-mail functionality used by WinAudit derives from the operating system. This component cannot create a Unicode message. A simple workaround is to copy the audit into an existing e-mail message or to save it in Unicode text format and then to send it as an attachment.

Not Supported

CSV

The comma delimited output is in ANSI only, this behaviour mimics that of a widely used spreadsheet application.

Configuration File

WinAudit creates the simple configuration file WinAudit.ini to save any non-default options selected. This file is ANSI because most options are simple on/off. It does however, store the last selected Data Source Name and username used to connect to a database. These will be lost if Unicode characters have been used. In the future this file may be UTF-8 file to overcome this minor deficiency.