How to get Cyrillic characters displayed correctly?

Tekla Structures

Not version-specific

Tekla Structures

Cyrillic characters

Russian characters

language settings

Environment

Not environment-specific

Question:
How to get Cyrillic characters displayed correctly if you don’t have the Russian language set as your operating system’s language?

Answer:
This tutorial will guide you through the steps of how to get Cyrillic characters displayed correctly if you don’t have the Russian language set as your operating system’s language. This tutorial is for the Windows 7 operating system. You have to have administrator rights on your computer to apply these settings, so if you don’t have them, please contact your system administrator.

This is how your Tekla Structures interface looks like (Beam Properties and Profile Catalog) if you are using the Russian environment with the Windows operating system for example in English (or any other language that does not contain Cyrillic characters).

To get it to work properly:

1. You have to change the system locale to Russian. This will not affect your system's interface language. As the Windows help explains “The system locale determines the default character set (letters, symbols, and numbers) and font used to enter and display information in programs that don't use Unicode.”

a. To change, go to Control Panel -> Region and Language and click on the Administrative tab.

b. There click Change system locale… and from the drop-down list select Russian (Russia).

c. After applying the settings you will have to restart your computer.
d. After restarting your computer, Cyrillic characters should look correct in the Tekla Structures interface, e.g. Beam Properties and Profile Catalog.

e. But in some places, e.g. grid labels in the model view or layout templates, the characters could still be displayed incorrectly.

2. In this case, you have to set the XS_STD_LOCALE advanced option in the initialization file lang_rus.ini

a. Go to the Tekla Structures installation folder, e.g. C:\Program Files\Tekla Structures\<version>\nt\bin
b. Open lang_rus.ini with some text editor and add set XS_STD_LOCALE=russian_us.1251 (or other locale character codepage string). For more information see XS_STD_LOCALE.

c. You won’t be able to save the file directly to the installation folder. You have to save the changed lang_rus.ini file somewhere else and afterward copy it to the installation folder.
d. After applying this advanced option all Cyrillic characters in Tekla Structures will be displayed correctly.

Starting from Tekla Structures 21.0 in the Russian environment there is an option to choose Role when a user launches the software. If the characters in that dropdown menu are not correct, the user has to set Format to Russian (Russia) in Windows Region and Language settings under the Formats tab.

The same rule applies to all other environments and languages, that do not use English characters. These settings also affect Drawing Layouts as they are loaded according to the chosen role. If the Format is not set correctly all the Drawing Layouts might not be available.

By following the steps described in this tutorial, you can also set Tekla Structures to display correct characters for other languages and environments, e.g. Chinese, Japanese or Korean.

See also: