build DCMTK with UNICODE support

[Pramod]

Dear friends,

Please tell me, how to build DCMTK application with UNICODE support in Visual Studio?

Regards
Pramod

[Michael Onken]

Hi,

What kind of character support do you actually aiming at?

DCMTK does not support any specific character sets in it's string class OFString or in any DICOM VR (datatype) classes.

Regards,
Michael

[Pramod]

Thanks for the quick reply.

We need to support Turkey language.
Please tell me, how can I enable this support using DCMTK.

Regards
Pramod

[Michael Onken]

Hi,

DCMTK just handles character strings without interpreting them. E. g. if you receive a patients name you can get the character string from the corresponding DICOM element and if you want to display it you have to ensure yourself that you intpret that string correctly (usually at looking in DICOM after the attribute "Specific Character Set" (0008,0005) which denotes the character set used for the file).

So DCMTK does not convert between different character things but only treats them as a number of bytes; interpretation of characters for display etc. is up to the user.

Regards,
Michael

[J. Riesmeier]

To the original poster: This has changed only recently. We've just completed a first version of an enhanced character set support for the DCMTK. This does not only include the ISO 2022 code extension technique, but also ISO Latin 3 and 5 (which are probably more interesting for you). If compiled with "libiconv", all affected strings in a DICOM dataset using any of the DICOM character sets can now be converted to UTF-8 (see "dcmconv --convert-to-utf8"). As already mentioned, this is only a first step of enhanced character set support ...

If you are interested in details, check our public git repository!