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Non-English Languages

A topic by solskaia created May 14, 2023 Views: 443 Replies: 10
Viewing posts 1 to 3
(+1)

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!

Developer

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.

(+1)

Hi! Is this the same answer for special characters (especially accents) used in France, such as "é" and "à"?

Developer

Correct. See also this issue on the Decker source repository.

(+1)

I saw that it was" possible to  make some new fonts for Decker, or adapt existing bitmapped fonts". I would try to add diacritics letters (instead of unused symbols like %#$). Is it possible to have a quick tutorial on how to do it ? Which format should be used etc etc.

Developer (1 edit)

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?

(1 edit)

Hmmm, I guess it's too complicated for me, I've tried to use the script you gave to edit the font, but I'm not able to make It work. I guess I'll remove every accent and it will be alright. 

Developer

Did you try the font editor tool that I mentioned?


If there's anything in particular about the UI that doesn't make sense I could attempt to clarify.

i would love to use it but I can’t figure how to have the screenshot you show me :/ 

Developer

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?

(+1)

Aaah it works! My mistake was that instead of opening, I just dragged fontedit.deck directly onto my deck!

Excellent, I'll look into it, thanks! 

Deleted 295 days ago