Re: [Adonthell-general] UTF-8 Plan

[Alexandre Courbot]

> > I am thinking of forking off 0.3.2 and adding UTF-8 support to make
> > sure I know what I am doing, then folding the working code back into
> > the main tree. Sound reasonable?
> 
> Sure. Although it's better to fork off from the current state (which is
> sorta post 0.3.2, but pre 0.3.3), because the dialogue engine has been
> rewritten since 0.3.2.

Be VERY carefull with branches. We already have some running, and it
turned out to be a mess. 

> > Also, we need Unicode support in the dialogue engine only, or the map 
> > engine as well? In short, what parts of the Adonthell engine display 
> > text to the user.
> 
> There's the dialogue engine (dialog.h), the speech bubbles
> (text_bubble.h) and the window system in general (label.h). The strings
> themselves are spread across the various python scripts. But changing
> them to unicode strings is trivial, as far as I know.

Adding UTF-8 support to the dialog engine should be trivial, I think, as
Python natively handles it and dialogs are nothing more than Python
scripts. Actually you don't even have to add UTF-8 support to the dialog
engine, as to get Japanese strings it will call the nls translate
function with the english text as a parameter. And as gettext already 
supports UTF-8 (fortunately :)), there is nothing special to be done
there. Am I right Kai?

The only part that would need UTF-8 support - that is, the only part
that displays text - would be the Window system. 0.3 one simply can't. I
guess you'd be better inspired to work on the new one in the 0.4 branch,
although there is no much yet - and Joel already planned to support
UTF-8 with it.

> > Are we using standard TTFs, or still our own Waste's Edge font? Making
> > a Unicode TTF will be non-trivial, I am afraid, so handling standard
> > TTFs might be a good idea.
> 
> I imagine we'd be using some standard TTF. It all depends whether we'll
> find some good, free TTF - shouldn't be a huge problem.

Right. This is probably what will happen with the new window system.
Unfortunately, 0.3 one only supports 8 bits characters, so Japanese
support would involve using a special font, and no Kanjis at all of
course.

I don't know whether it's worth to spend some time for this on 0.3 -
foreign language support should rather be ported to 0.4 IMO. Let's hear
what Joel is saying about that. Joel?

Alex.
-- 
http://www.gnurou.org