Font support for Central European languages...

[Solearis]

Hi there,
I tried to start to translate the stringtable to Slovak, but I have a problem about the font support....
I also don't know what encoding should I use....
for Slovak language I should use ISO-LATIN-2, but I dunno though...
thanks for the reply....

[pd]

I'm not quite sure, but this thread might help you.

[Solearis]

nah, it didn't help,
I'm testing now with various fonts and encoding sets, maybe I come up with some sort of solution for this problem...

[Solearis]

I tried various encodings and sadly, the only encoding set that displays slovak characters besides ISO-8859-2 is Unicode and that is not supported...
I would be clad of support for Unicode, because without it, it is nearly impossible to translate into Central European Languages.....

[Solearis]

for better understanding my inqueries I think it would be wise of me to represent you a sample of characters I need to translate into Slovak...
those characters are as follows:
ľ š č ť ž ý á í é ô ď ň ä ó ĺ ŕ ú
and their coresponding capitals are:
Ľ Š Č Ť Ý Á Í É (ô doesn't have a capital form) Ď Ň (ä doesn't have a capital form neither) Ó Ĺ Ŕ Ú

...I found a posibility to implement these charactersonly in two character sets:
ISO-8859-2 (also known as ISO-LATIN-2)
Unicode...

...there may be other sets, I do not reject it...

...I think it would be wise to us Unicode because in Unicode you have represented nearly all languages that you can possibly convert a game to ...

...I would be pleased if someone could drop a line or two whether this is possible or what course of action should I take...

P.S.: there is a possibility to translate without those characters, using only simple forms (for example a instead of ä) but that would be only an add-hoc solution which will result in the loss of the readibility of the text translated to Slovak...

[pd]

As mentioned here we are now using the DejaVu font. I had a fast look at the characters included and to me it seems that everything you need is included in there, though I might be wrong. So, please check yourself.

[Solearis]

...ah now I see...
...later today I try the UTF-8 encoding and see how it will work out...

[Solearis]

...now everything is nicely shown there, but there is one "little" problem...
...if I save the chars in UTF-8 they are, ehm, strange....if I save them in Unicode, the resisult is even worse, nothing is displayed at all...
...what should I do what encoding should I use???

[pd]

Sadly I'm not much of a help here, since my experience with such stuff equals zero.

To make it easier for others to help you should perhaps clarify what you mean by 'strange' :)
A screenshot might be helpful. If you need a hosting service i recommend http://www.imageshack.us

[Solearis]

...OK I done a test...
...the test involved this string of characters:

ľščťžýáíéôúňä

...I changed an entry for the new single player game to this string...
...I've tried various encodings and you can that the results are too bad...

on the left you can see the text and on the right the actual encoding in which I made the screenie...

...note: I've tried Big and Little Endian Unicode, but the chars in these sets are represented with more bits so, it did not work...
...I think you may see the things from my point now...
...any suggestions???

[Yoghurt]

Save it in UTF-8. I'm sure Zach will modify GiGi's font routines soon.

[Solearis]

....OK will do...

[Cyber Killer]

How's it going with utf-8 support? I tested my early translated file in the current relase for windows and in the statically compiled Linux release and in both my language special characters are displayed incorrectly. I'm currently struggling to compile the current svn revision myself and I'll check there.

edit:
I couldn't compile a new boost, and the ver in my distro's (Kubuntu) repo is too old. I'll wait for the new version and try then.

[Geoff the Medio]

How's it going with utf-8 support?

As far as I know, no progress has been made in this issue. A motivated volunteer is encouraged to try, however.

[Cyber Killer]

That's too bad... I recon I would be probably able to fix this (usually getting proper encoding support is quite easy given that the font suports it, which in this case supports - DejaVu), but I need lots of spare time to take a look at the game code. Usually it's a case of using a version of the string displaying function that uses utf8 instead of the simples one (example for Qt4: using trUtf8() instead of tr() ).

I'll try later this month though...