Japanese translation

[Gilbert]

Well, if you're famaliar with Japanese input modules, you'll know what they are.
For example "SYO" is just 'Si" + (small)"Yo", it's a shortcut.
They're there for convenience's sake, you can always just type them in using "SI LYO" (LYO = Little YO).

My recommendation is, after reading the section on how to compile the editor, compile it and try it out, type something and soon you'll understand how it works.

EDIT: I wrote, V2.62, not V2.6.

[Kinoko]

Oh, whoops ^_^;;

[Gilbert]

And I forgot about your question regarding Japanese punctuations, the short answer is: no.
The reason is currently the slots are quite tightly packed already, and there're still chances that I have to free up some more vital control characters and move some of the symbols, so i haven't considered adding them at the moment (I think they're just a subset of the Chines punctuations), you can still use the western comman and fullstop though.

[Kinoko]

I actually edited the Japanese font and made my own. It's a little bigger, more stylised, contains all the hiragana characters and all the punctuation I think I'll need plus a couple of 'fun' characters my game will be using. I also created an outline for it, and I'm pretty happy with it. Of course, I had to sacrifice all the English characters, but I won't need them, personally. So... I think I'm gonna go with this. I haven't tried the editor out yet but when I do, I'll let you know how it goes.

Of course, this is all still somewhat premature because I have to finish my game before I use this.

[Gilbert]

Good.

And I just tried FontForge, it works and satisfies all our needs, apart from the fact that it's a bit difficult to use.
Unfortunately, I underestimated the number of characters a bit, that I couldn't stuff in all the Hirakana and Katakana characters into 256 slots without sacrificing, but hey, I finally get a TTF file (done by moving the useful characters of MS Gothic into the first 256 slots) with both sets of Japanese characters (no need to append the dotdots or circles now), half of the lower case English alphabets are gone though. Punctuations are not yet added but it's working anyway.

So, by playing around with my editor, I quickly mucked up a TTF version of it, which can be found here. There's no document yet, but since it's basically the same programme, you can read the document from the SCI version. Maybe some small flaws were fixed, but it's just a quick mod, so even some of the known problems are not fixed yet.
One main difference is that, since we can display Katakana now, pressing TAB will cycle between "NO CONVERSION", "HIRAKANA" and "KATAKANA" input modes as opposed to only two modes in the SCI version.
Note also that text files generated by either version are not interchangeable, since the character arrangements of the two font sets are different.

EDIT: Hummm, seems that the new uploads to 2dadventures.com are not working at the moment (can be seen by the fact that some other members' uploaded pics not showing up), hopefully they'll work again later.
Download seems to be working again after re-uploading.