title: ICU, Unicode and libraries
body: <p>My goal is to implement Unicode in UTF-16 format in an embedded system. I want to be able to use multiple languages to display on my LCD. The texts in multiple languages are going to be written in separate text files.
  I usually program with Eclipse with a GCC compiler.</p>
  
  <p>I've done some research about Unicode and it seems that ICU holds good libraries to get Unicode working on embedded systems.
  The ICU version I've downloaded is written for Windows Visual Studio 10. I'm fairly new to this program so bear with me..
  I've installed Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 to compile ICU and changed the library path as mentioned in the readme file.
  When trying to run the cintltst im getting the following error:</p>
  
  <pre><code>#### Note:  ICU Init without build-specific setDataDirectory() failed.
  U_FILE_ACCESS_ERROR
  #### ERROR! C:\Documents\ICU\source\test\cintltst\.\x86\Debug\cintltst.exe: u_init() failed with status = "U_FILE_ACCESS_ERROR".
  *** Check the ICU_DATA environment variable and
  *** check that the data files are present.
  *** Exiting.  Use the '-w' option if data files were
  *** purposely removed, to continue test anyway.
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Now a couple of questions:</p>
  
  <p>1) I don't know what file the ICU is expecting, or even what I should expect to be a proper output.</p>
  
  <p>2) Do I need to include a library of Unicode in some form?</p>
  
  <p>3) If I'm able to run this sample program, should I change anything prior to copying the needed files into my own software?</p>
  
  <p>4) The software shows me that failure of this check is normal when ICU data is not packaged into a shared library. Does this mean I need to package the ICU data somehow?</p>
  
  <p>I think it could be something in the settings of Visual Studio which is not correct.</p>
  
  <p>Thanks for your time!</p>