New beta build — shaped by your reports
The Unicode preview moves fast: this refreshed build folds in fixes and features driven directly by tester feedback, widens two more drivers, and lands full documentation coverage. Already testing? Everything below is new since the last build.
Highlights of this drop — then the full tester guide, whose dated “beta refresh” markers flag exactly what changed since you last read it.
MESSAGE() displays wide
All the displayed text — message, caption, custom |-list
button captions, the copyable CANCOPY form — now renders exact
UTF-16, emoji included. No prototype change, no code change;
plain ANSI calls are untouched.
CHR() takes the full Unicode range
CHR(1F4A9h,1) returns the surrogate pair directly — no
manual D800h math. Constants fold at compile time. And shared code can
now gate its wide paths on the new predefined compile flag
_USTRING_ (undefined on older compilers, so
OMIT keeps it portable).
Rich text binds USTRING
TEXT,...,RTF with a USTRING USE variable displays, edits
and saves back wide. Plain text stays exact UTF-16; formatted content
saves as portable RTF source — paste it into Word or WordPad and your
characters survive, emoji included.
Sharper language edges
Value USTRING parameters are writable private copies
(STRING parity — something value CSTRING never offered), and a
&USTRING reference-assignment crash found through a
beta report is fixed. Keep those reports coming.
Emoji fixes from the field
Two beta reports, two fixes: a color emoji at the right edge of an
ENTRY was clipped, and mixed text-plus-emoji on UNICODE
report pages could drop the text half. Both print and display
correctly now.
The Memory driver goes wide
USTRING fields, keys and UNICODE blobs on DRIVER('Memory').
Keys order by linguistic collation — the same order a
keyed QUEUE gives wide components, so in-memory tables and queues agree.
TopScan reads .tpsw
TopSpeedW joins TopScan’s driver list — open, browse and edit wide TPS files; USTRING values round-trip bit-identically at rest. Plus a Segoe UI face-lift (your saved font choice is kept).
64-bit SQL integers, lossless
bigint / PG int8 imports as
DECIMAL(19,0) and the full 19-digit value round-trips on
every driver lane — earlier builds went through LONG or a double and
silently rounded past 15–16 digits.
The books caught up
The Language Reference now covers the whole Unicode
surface — USTRING, BSTRING, CHR, conversion functions, the REPORT
UNICODE attribute, error codes. The
Database Drivers guide gains TopSpeedW, the text-driver
4 GB story, and a first-ever precise chapter on driver-string and
owner-string syntax (now 1024 characters, up from a silently truncating 255).
Full tester guide — mental model, conversion rules, DCT import table, screen controls, reports, blobs, SQL / SQLite / text drivers / TopSpeedW / Memory, recipes, and what to focus on when testing. Changes since the last build are flagged inline with dated “beta refresh” notes.
Open the full Unicode Tester Guide
Report tool authors —
the wide generator surface has shipped
(IReportGeneratorW — six methods, opt-in, zero break for
existing implementors). Format detection, the EMF record set, transition
paths per integration style:
Standalone pages (best full-width). Everything described there is implemented unless marked as a known limitation — different behavior is exactly what we want to hear about.