Support for non-English language character sets

In version 4.0 we will achieve two of our goals in making Simile more easily used by modellers whose working language is not English.

Firstly, we better support the use of extended western European characters (such as ñ) in parameter names. At present (v3.3), these are transliterated to underscore characters in the equation. Although this did not prevent the equation from functioning perfectly correctly, we believe that using the extended character set will greatly improve the ease of reading equations written using non-English words.

Secondly, we have eliminated a whole class of problems (which did prevent Simile functioning correctly) related to handling non-Latin characters, such as Chinese or Japanese characters. Simile v3.3 is unable to process files whose path names contain non-Latin characters, and this restriction has caused a number of users some inconvenience. We are delighted that this restriction is removed in v4.0, with Simile supporting all UTF-8 encoded characters.

If you have any comments on internationalisation or localisation issues, please let us know.

Kind regards,
Alastair Davies