John McGehee

In this article I show you how to use multilingual UTF-8 strings with standard, unmodified OpenAccess oa-22.04p028 release. In the last  article , I introduced UTF-8, the popular 8 bit encoding of Unicode into multibyte character strings that can represent virtually every written language in history.  I presented the OpenAccess software changes required to fully support UTF-8 and showed you how to convert your existing application software to properly manipulate UTF-8 in the OpenAccess oaString class.

I once had a job scrutinizing Virtuoso schematics that contained many useful annotations written in Italian.  EDA tools generally support only ASCII strings, but the Italian designers were lucky–theirs is one of the few languages that can be written naturally using the same characters as English. Wouldn’t it be nice to annotate designs in OpenAccess databases using any of the world’s languages?  You can do it right now, using any OpenAccess release.