Symbols in QMAKE_TARGET_COPYRIGHT?

RogueWarrior

Has anyone tried adding the copyright symbol to the QMAKE_TARGET_COPYRIGHT .pro value?
On Windows, it only half works. You get the symbol but it's always preceded by a capital A with a little circle over it.
Same thing happens if you try to use the registered trademark symbol in QMAKE_TARGET_PRODUCT.
It all looks fine in Qt Creator so I don't know if it's a Windows bug or if it happens during the build.

Paul Colby

@RogueWarrior said:

Has anyone tried adding the copyright symbol to the QMAKE_TARGET_COPYRIGHT .pro value?

At a quick glance, it would appear not (github search).

However, it sounds like character encoding / misinterpretation issue.

I'm guessing:

you've pasted the UTF-8 encoding for "COPYRIGHT SIGN" into your *.pro file
that character, in UTF-8, is the bytes 0xC2 and 0xA9
you're using a latin or ASCII charset in your *.rc file's StringFileInfo block(s)
those bytes in Latin-1 are "Capital A circumflex" (Â) and "Copyright sign" (©)

You could either:

encode your *.pro file in ASCII (not sure what encoding(s) qmake officially supports for *.pro files, eg QTBUG-27896?); or
change your *.rc file's StringFileInfo block to use UTF-8 (unfortunately, I doubt this will work - MS appears to only support "Unicode", which is usually MS-speak for 16-bit chars); or
use some char-escape sequence in the *.pro file (does qmake support things like "\xA9"?)

I can see why everyone else seems to have settled for "(c)".

Cheers.

Paul Colby

Just looking at the qmake source, the default RC file that qmake generates specified the Unicode charset (though the code doesn't actually guarantee that it's writing UCS-2 - it depends on the configured Windows locale).

Are you using a default-generated RC file, or have you hand-written your own RC file? ie does your *.pro file specify either RC_FILE or RES_FILE?

RogueWarrior

@Paul-Colby I just used the .pro file. Haven't tried messing with the .rc file yet.

Paul Colby

After a little more reading, its seems that your supposed to use the (magic?) "\251" sequence for the copyright symbol in Windows resource files. I see no official reference documentation for why that is, and no doubt it pre-dates Microsoft's Unicode support, but it is used in various Microsoft examples, such as https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc194812.aspx

Note, using a platform-specific value like this would usually bother me, but QMAKE_TARGET_COPYRIGHT is a Windows only variable anyway, so it shouldn't be a problem? (if it did bother you, you could hand-bake your own *.rc file)

Finally, here's some examples from Github of *.pro files using \251 - https://github.com/search?utf8=✓&q=QMAKE_TARGET_COPYRIGHT+AND+\251&type=Code&ref=searchresults but it essentially boils down to something like:

QMAKE_TARGET_COPYRIGHT = "\\251 2016 All my code belongs to me"

Cheers.

RogueWarrior

Awesome! That works great. FYI, \256 is the magic incantation for the registered trademark symbol.