Hi, I have a question: is there any way to incorporate non-English letters into the text fields? Currently, they show up as question marks, and I'd love to create something in my native language. Thanks!
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Unfortunately, this is a bit difficult. Decker and Lil do not include Unicode support, as it would add considerable complexity throughout the application, especially in the text layout routines and the fonts shipped with with every standalone deck. This was a tradeoff I made to keep the scope of the project within my own limited means to develop it.
It is possible to create custom fonts that remap ASCII characters to a different set of glyphs- this deck, for example, uses a customized font to display some text using the Cyrillic alphabet, and I know of at least one person tinkering with a Hiragana font. Rich text fields support inline images, which offers a (somewhat clumsy) solution to needing a specific additional character or two. The biggest downside to the customized font approach is text entry: Decker has no way of knowing how to map non-ASCII characters into the glyph set of a given font. Depending on how different your language's character set and/or keyboard layout is from US-ASCII, it might be very unpleasant or confusing to type.
I apologize for the accessibility problems posed by these constraints. I think most improvements would be highly language-specific and possibly quite daunting in scope.
Correct. See also this issue on the Decker source repository.
Decker comes with a very basic font editor in the "examples" directory: fontedit.deck. The font editor lets you make copies of existing fonts and modify glyphs and metadata. When you're finished, save the font editor deck, and then you can use the Font/DA Mover to import fonts from that deck into other projects.
On a low level, fonts are represented as FNT0 datablocks, and the Font Interface offers an API for manipulating fonts with scripts. These might be handy if you want to try making a better font editor or making your own conversion/import tools from scratch.
There's also some information that might be useful in this older thread: https://itch.io/t/2455731/importing-custom-fonts-from-file
Does that help?
Decker's font editor is a deck made in Decker itself, rather than a built-in feature.
If you download Decker on itch, inside the zip file is a directory named "examples", and inside that directory is a deck named "fontedit.deck".
If you run Decker and then open "fontedit.deck", you will have an editor like the screenshot above. As I noted earlier, if you make changes to this deck and save it, you can then import your newly created/modified fonts from fontedit.deck into other decks.
Is that more clear?