Adventure Game Studio

AGS Support => Beginners' Technical Questions => Topic started by: SilverSpook on Mon 22/02/2016 07:29:24

Title: Hyphens and elipses in strings
Post by: SilverSpook on Mon 22/02/2016 07:29:24
Hi, when I add certain characters into dialog like a hyphen (-) or an elipses (...) the dialog shows strange symbols like squares or bracket-looking things.  Is there a way to just display a hyphen in dialog?

EDIT: Sorry, I figured this out.  It looks like Microsoft Word was automatically turning my double dashes into special character hyphens and elipses into some math character.  Feel free to delete this.
Title: Re: Hyphens and elipses in strings
Post by: Snarky on Mon 22/02/2016 07:56:59
Quote from: SilverSpook on Mon 22/02/2016 07:29:24
EDIT: Sorry, I figured this out.  It looks like Microsoft Word was automatically turning my double dashes into special character hyphens and elipses into some math character.  Feel free to delete this.

As a typography geek, let me just pick you up on a couple of things: Word didn't turn your dashes into hyphens, it turned your double hyphens into dashes (en-dashes, IIRC). And it turned your three periods into a special ellipsis character. Because keyboards only have a very basic symbol set, Word and other apps use heuristics to transform certain symbols into more typographically appropriate ones (notably "smart quotes" or "curly quotes"). The heuristic sometimes gets it wrong (for example with words that start with an apostrophe: Word thinks it's an opening single-quote and curls it the wrong way), but that doesn't seem to be the issue here. It's simply that these more advanced symbols aren't supported by AGS.
Title: Re: Hyphens and elipses in strings
Post by: SilverSpook on Mon 22/02/2016 08:11:07
Ah, interesting.

Yeah, I had the curled-quote issue earlier in the development cycle and changed settings in autocorrect/autoformat so AGS doesn't get confused by them.

The solution was to just turn the autoformatting of double hyphens and ellipses off in Word.
Title: Re: Hyphens and elipses in strings
Post by: Khris on Mon 22/02/2016 12:19:25
The solution is to not use Word for projects that don't end up as a printout.
Title: Re: Hyphens and elipses in strings
Post by: SilverSpook on Mon 22/02/2016 12:26:04
Probably right.  It's just easier to organize dialog and story material in Word for me. 
Title: Re: Hyphens and elipses in strings
Post by: Monsieur OUXX on Tue 23/02/2016 09:48:36
Quote from: SilverSpook on Mon 22/02/2016 12:26:04
Probably right.  It's just easier to organize dialog and story material in Word for me. 

Consider using intermediate text editors such as Notepad++ (notice the "++" at the end). It's free and veru helpful to avoid screwing up with encoding and such.