Inquiry regarding Encoding selection in QCAD 3.32 Professional (Traditional Chinese OS)

General
1

Dear QCAD Support Team,

I am writing to inquire about the Encoding settings in QCAD 3.32 Professional.

I am currently using QCAD on a Traditional Chinese (Big5/CP950) operating system in Taiwan. I frequently encounter garbled text (Mojibake) when opening DWG files created in Simplified Chinese (GBK/CP936) environments.

I have already followed the standard troubleshooting steps:

  1. Disabled “Use native file dialogs” in Application Preferences.

  2. Switched to the QCAD-specific file dialog.

However, even with these settings, the “Encoding” dropdown menu does NOT appear in the Open File dialog in version 3.32. This makes it impossible to manually select the correct encoding (e.g., GB2312 or CP936) before opening a file.

Could you please clarify:

  • In version 3.32, where exactly can I find the manual encoding selection in the file dialog?

  • If this option has been moved or removed, is there a recommended way to force QCAD to interpret DWG files using a specific code page without changing the global system locale?

Properly handling multi-language encoding is crucial for our workflow and for promoting QCAD in our region. I look forward to your guidance.

Best regards,wmf

2

I can confirm that QCAD does not offer a way to choose the encoding manually. All files written by QCAD are in Unicode / UTF-8. QCAD also only supports Unicode fonts, no legacy TrueType fonts with Windows code page encodings.

When opening a file, the file should correctly identify its encoding (DWGCODEPAGE). QCAD should then be able to correctly decode and display the text. If you can attach your file, we can help you more efficiently.

Can you also try to enter some text in Simplified Chinese in a new, empty drawing and save and reload it with QCAD?