Since Presentation Manager resources provide the ability to define all the user interface properties of a Presentation Manager application, externally to the application code, they provide a useful means for implementing national language support within Presentation Manager applications. Resources may be used to define:
In short, all of the language-specific properties of an application may be defined using Presentation Manager resources. Icons and other graphical symbols used by the user interface may also be tailored to suit different cultures where such symbols may have different meanings.
The set of resources for each national language may be compiled and incorporated into a separate dynamic link library, which may be accessed by the application in order to load the required resources, as described in Loading Dialogs From a DLL. The resource identifiers must, of course, be identical in each DLL. Upon installation of the application on a workstation, an installation procedure can prompt the user to determine the required language, and install the appropriate DLL for that language.
Where multiple languages must be supported in the same system, an application may query the codepage currently in use by its parent process using the WinQueryCp() function, and load resources from a specific DLL, depending upon the result of the function call. While this method is by no means foolproof, it will suffice for many languages that use a single national codepage and single-byte characters.