UniFEP SDK

Otfried Cheong and Enfour, Inc.

February 20th 2001

UniFEP is a system that makes an EPOC Release 5 device Unicode-capable. There currently are Chinese, Korean, and Japanese versions, complete with fonts and input methods for the target locale. It is quite possible to use multiple languages on a single device by installing the necessary input methods and fonts.

For simplicity, in this documentation we have used the terms V1, V2 and V3 to describe different levels of Unicode support and localization. These are only code names, not product names.

V1 represents application-level Unicode support -as seen in UniFEP 1.x Japanese products. V2 is OS-wide Unicode support via soft-loaded MMU patches -as seen in UniFEP V2 in Japan and UniFEP TC for Chinese. V3 is the code name for future products that imbed Unicode support right into ROM images.

The first major release of UniFEP for ER5 was published in July 1999 for the Psion Series 5, and later in that year for the 5mx and Revo--all these were Japanese versions only. This is referred to as UniFEP V1 or 1.x. It enabled Unicode display in the ROM applications and OPL, but not in third-party C++ applications. We will only mention this version in the OPL section.

UniFEP V2 appeared in a Japanese version in August 2000, with Chinese and Korean versions following in the near future. UniFEP V2 enables Unicode in third party applications, but with a few restrictions.

UniFEP V3 will remove these restrictions, but only runs on Unicode-capable ER5 devices (that is, devices with Unicode-rendering built into ROM). Psion demonstrated a prototype of such a device in early November 2000.

If your application is installed on an ER5 device (Psion Series 5mx, Revo, Series 7, netBook, and the Ericsson MC218) with UniFEP V2 or V3, it will automatically display in Unicode. For third-parties V2 and V3 support is basically the same. This document explains what you need to do to make your application run nicely in this environment.


Otfried Cheong and Enfour, Inc. Version 2.59, December 31, 2000.