Adventure Game Studio

Hey there.

I wrote a function (http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?board=2;action=display;threadid=13300) with which I intend to properly display accented characters with an SCI font. As you may know, this is currently only possible with a True Type font or by replacing existing characters in a SCI font.

With this method you wouldn't have to replace any existing characters, but can use the (nearly) empty slots 1-31 for accented characters (and probably slots beyond 126 in later AGS versions).
For example, this means that translators won't have to use characters like } for é when translating your game but can actually put the é in the text. And so could you in your code.

Of course for this to work, every string has to be treated with the above function before it is displayed on the screen, otherwise the game will halt if an extended character is to be used.

To make a long story short, I'd like to compile a list of accented and/or special characters that are used in your native language, with the most important characters on top and the least important on the bottom.
This way someone creating a custom font will know which characters are the most important for a given language and which ones can be ignored if necessary.

Lists of the accented characters themselves are found aplenty on the net, but no indication of how important a character is for a particular language.
For example, what are the spanish ¿ and ¡ used for and how important are they?

I'll start with my native language:

German
Ã,,,ä,Ö,ö,Ãœ,ü // pretty important, but can be expressed Ae,ae,Oe,oe,Ue,ue if necessary
àŸ // not as important, can be expressed ss

á é í ó ú, ü, ñ, are enough for Spanish, I think...

add à , è and ò for catalán...

Finnish:

ä, Ã,, & ö, Ö

Farl: And their uppercase counterparts?

Farlander, you didn't answer one of his questions so I'll grab it.  The upside-down ! and ? in Spanish bracket the question or exclamation. They use 'em just like the normal ones except at the beginning as well (which makes more sense - gives you a feeling of how it's supposed to be read).

Examples: ¡Ay caramba! Or ¿Estan su cabeza in el culo?

EDIT: Somehow I missed it, but all I said was covered in the first post. For some reason I skipped over the last three lines by Strazer. Stupid me. :-[

æ - lower
Æ - upper

ø
Ø

Ã¥
Å 

I suppose you already know about them, but that should cover the rest of the Scandinavian special characters.

Quote
I suppose you already know about them, but that should cover the rest of the Scandinavian special characters.

Is the "thorn" character still in use in some Scandinavian languages? I remember something to the effect when I did medieval studies at uni...

Edh (àð) and Thorn (þàž) are only used in Icelandic nowadays, I think.

edit: according to Wikipedia, Edh is also used in Faroese. You had better include it if you don't want to insult the thousands of AGSers on the Faroe Islands.

Oh, and I want Klingon letters too. You cannot truly appreciate Mom's Quest until you've played it in the original Klingon.

Also Include all Asian "symbols" or whatever they are called in English

Greek letters, Norse runes, Egyptian hieroglyphics, Babylonic cuneiform, Celtic Ogham, Sindarin, and that alphabet I made up with my brother when I was five.

Oh, and I need it by tomorrow.

Edit
Sorry, I'll shut up now... let the thread return to topic.

Back to the topic - if you want all of the special edition letters used by ALL the various wacky languages that use the (sort of) Roman alphabet, you're going to run out of room quickly. For example, you'd need another 16 characters for Polish and Czech each. (not entirely sure, but it certainly is about that much)

It seems that the only way would be to do this for each language separately, as it's done now. Maybe write a tool to let people order the available symbols to their satisfaction without any generic font editing nonsense getting in the way.

Doing this properly might involve mapping codepages (ISO/IEC 8859 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8859)) to control characters - maybe the best option would be a plugin. There's an event hook (AGSE_TRANSLATETEXT) that could be used for it.

It's true Spanish newbie! In Spanish we open and close the exlamations and iterrogartions...

¡Tiene la cabeza en el culo!

Good attempt, Yaksplit...

Or SSH?

Edit for Strazer: Some people just don't care of putting accents in the capitals, but the "Ã'" should definitelly be... BTW, the Royal Academy of the Spanish Tongue says that capitals must be accentued if necessary either.

Are you compiling one font with all languages or am i confused? ;)

What about languages like hebrew and arabic? The lettres are completely different, no "special" characters though, except there are things like adding "pronounciation marks" or "vowel marks" or however you want to call them, which often come instead of vowel letters. :)

In English (yup. Good old English) You occasionally come across the acute accent on the letter e: é.  

This doesn't appear in upper case letters, since we stole it from the French.

While we're at it, here's the French ones in no particular order:

ç / Ç
ê
î
è
â
ù
û
à 
ô
é
In French you don't put accents on uppercase letters, except for Ç.

and here are the swedish ones: Å  Ã¥ Ã,, ä Ö ö

throw in an é too, it is used in some words but is not as important

QuoteThey use 'em just like the normal ones except at the beginning as well (which makes more sense - gives you a feeling of how it's supposed to be read).

Ingenious. Makes you wonder why other languages didn't pick up on that. :)

QuoteBack to the topic - if you want all of the special edition letters used by ALL the various wacky languages that use the (sort of) Roman alphabet, you're going to run out of room quickly.

Exactly. I think we agree this is less than ideal. But it'll have to do for the moment.

QuoteAre you compiling one font with all languages or am i confused?

That's not possible obviously. The reason I'm asking which letters are more important than others is because personally I want to support the most major languages with the least additional letters.
It's of course up to the font creator which languages he wants to support.

That's why information like

QuoteSome people just don't care of putting accents in the capitals, but the "Ã'" should definitelly be...

and

QuoteIn French you don't put accents on uppercase letters, except for Ç.

is quite useful.
Thanks for the contributions so far.

How many special characters? About 60,000 I think. There are different estimates.

And I really need some way of using a Chinese TTF in AGS! (for The Find) Maybe I'll just have to make like 50 fonts of my own and put only the characters I need in them. :(

If you had to use the Thorn, you could do as the idiot sign writers have done and write it as a Y.

Why, if you only need a few Chinese characters, just draw them, if you want to complete all messages with it, just forget it for teh time being.

Yeah, I'm going to need complete messages. I probably will only need this in a year or so, so there's no rush. So do you think CJ will implement support for extended characters in TTFs?

Not until someone requests it, and the problem was that only very few people would use it at the moment (that can include you and me and orange and probably a few others).
And I'm actually not that interested in it, as I think CJ could spend his time on more important features anyways. Moreover, only very few people (Cj himself not included <-- that's the main problem) would be testing this feature if added, which would produce some risks as it can be buggy and even effect other stuffs in worst cases. So my opinion is that it's probably not worth it, atr least not now.

I'll agree that it may attract more people here though.

Me want.

But what about the multi-lingual support? A whole section (chinatown) of The Find is in Chinese (with English subtitles at the bottom of the screen).

I have determined that 27 of the first 31 characters could be used for replacing the special characters.

For my font, I decided to use the following:
Ã,,äáâà ãÇçëéêèïíîÃ'ñÖöóôàŸÜüúûù

This covers the following languages:
- English
- Spanish
- Portuguese (or is uppercase àÆ' needed?)
- German
- French
- Finnish
- ...?

Unfortunately, I have just realized that there's no way to treat dialog lines with the conversion function. :P
So it seems the whole thing won't work after all...Sorry guys. :(

add Šå, since å, ä and ö are all vital swedish characters

Estonian alphabet is much like english (or standard latin?) alphabet but with 36 letters. We don't use w,x,y but all others, plus some vocals:

Ã,,ä (sounds like 'a' in word 'damn')
Öö (sounds like 'u' in name 'furby')
Üü (sounds like 'y' in word 'typical')
à•õ (?)

and consonants, which are used in only about 20 words
Š š
Žž
Which can be legally replaced with Sh or Zh.
Ool ader kharakters rimein the seim.
Pretty similar to most of other scandinavian languages.