IMPORTANT:
As of Altia Design 11.1, the ALP tool is no longer needed for certain DeepScreen targets. A new feature called "Text Shaping" handles this automatically, and is being added to DeepScreen targets as time goes on. Some targets may not support "Text Shaping". Please contact Altia Support to see if your target requires the use of the ALP tool.
As of Altia Design 11.1, the Text Shaping feature is always supported at design-time in Windows (when you are actually creating your model using Altia Design).
Please see this brief video for an overview of the Text Shaping feature:
https://altia.zendesk.com/entries/56493498
Continue reading if you will need to the ALP tool...
Altia fully supports Unicode. It may be helpful for you to read the UnicodeNotes.pdf file found in your Altia program group. Click "Start -> Programs -> Altia -> Altia Design x.x -> Manuals and Tutorials -> Unicode User's Guide" (File location: C:\usr\altia[versionNum]\help\UnicodeNotes.pdf).
As for Hebrew, Arabic, and any other language where the character order is right-to-left vs. left-to-right, the character order reversal must be handled by a tool we call "ALP" (Altia Language Processor).
Use this tool on your exported language data (see this KB video for exporting language data).
See attachments for an example DSN and the input and output of the ALP tool for this DSN.
Here is the man page for the command line tool:
alp : Altia Language Processor (Sep 13 2013).
Copyright (c) 2013 by Altia, Inc. All rights reserved.
Use this conversion tool to:
- allow rendering of right-to-left and left-to-right
languages in the same language string.
- handle the complex ligaturization rules of languages like Arabic.
usage:
alp [in] [out]
[in] = Altia language resource file name to process.
[out] = Output of processed Altia language resource file.
NOTES:
Input files may be encoded in:
ANSI, UTF8, UTF16LE, UTF16BE, UTF32LE, or UTF32BE.
Output file will always be encoded in UTF16LE.
The incoming string data will be processed in "Context"
direction, text and numbers are aligned according to the language
of the first character.
This tool requires an installed font, preferably one with a rich set of
characters/languages. The default font face used is Arial Unicode MS.
This font is typically supplied with Microsoft Office. If you do not have
this font or prefer to use a different font you may change the font used by
defining the "DEFAULT_FONT_FACE_NAME" environment variable with the
desired font face name.
The default font face index number is 0. If you have multiple faces in your
font and require a different index you may change it by defining the
"DEFAULT_FONT_FACE_INDEX" environment variable.
The default platform id is 3 (Microsoft). If you require a different
platform you may change it by defining the "DEFAULT_PLATFORM_ID"
environment variable.
The default encoding id used is 1 (Unicode). If you require a different
encoding id you may change it by defining the "DEFAULT_ENCODING_ID"
environment variable.