Re: [Exult-general] International characters, UTF-8, ES and Exult

[Willem J. P. <wpa...@ma...>]

On Fri, Sep 05, 2008 at 07:01:40PM -0700, Marzo Junior wrote:
>     (2) As above, but allow a user to specify (as a global setting)
>     the codepage he wants to use (as the system codepage may not be
>     what he wants; particularly if the system uses UTF-8) and then
>     translate back and forth into this codepage (allowing lossy
>     conversion, but notifying the user of the issue). This is a lot
>     cleaner, and allows correct back-and-forth translation to be
>     lossless. I think I will implement it this way.
> 
>     (3) Change Exult to use UTF-8 for NPC/shape/frame names. For
>     starters, I am not sure if vga fonts can have all the required
>     characters (although I think they can), not to mention that it
>     would be a lot of work having to modify all text output, input and
>     processing routines (and not to mention that making a font for a
>     mod would be boring work -- although we could host the fonts in
>     SVN and gradually add characters as users submit them).

If we can stick with single-byte charsets/encodings, then I agree (2)
would be better at this point. I'd make the 'codepage' a per-game
setting rather than a global setting, though. (Do we already have a
place where we can store per-game Exult Studio settings?)

If we do want to use multi-byte encodings, then it's probably best to
switch to utf-8. To avoid having to design our own unicode-font
structures, maybe we could then use truetype-fonts when using utf-8
strings.

In any case, I think I'd go with (2).

-Willem Jan