With this drop-down box, you can select a different display codepage to be used for the WarpIN windows.

Per default, WarpIN will use the process codepage that it was started with. Unless you have issued the CHCP command on the command line before starting WarpIN, this will be the default codepage from CONFIG.SYS.

Starting with V0.9.18, WarpIN is fully Unicode-enabled. WarpIN uses the UTF-8 encoding for all internal computations and uses codepages for display only. All display is converted from Unicode to the display codepage before being displayed.

Changing the display codepage might be necessary if you have selected a package that contains non-English characters. This can happen, for example, if you have opened an archive with Russian characters but your current display codepage does not contain those. This does not mean that WarpIN cannot handle the data, it just can't display it. In those cases, you will see random question mark (?) characters for those characters that are not supported. This is why WarpIN allows you to change the display codepage.

This setting affects all WarpIN windows in both "Install" and "Database" modes and is remembered with the other WarpIN preferences. It does not affect the back-end WarpIN engine though, which will always run with the process codepage to avoid problems with exotic filenames. In addition, since WarpIN's engine processes and stores all character data in Unicode, this affects display only, but will not modify any data on disk or in the database.

The list of codepages presented is the intersection of codepages that are supported by both WarpIN and the OS/2 Presentation Manager (PM). WarpIN does all Unicode translations internally without relying on operating system functions, so this should work on all versions of OS/2. However, to display correctly, the codepage must be supported by PM as well, hence the intersection.

See Codepages and Unicode for a more detailed description and a list of commonly used codepages.

Note that when you change this setting, WarpIN will ask you to restart itself to pick up the change.