A fast, easy to use, free, and community supported 2D game engine
ob1
Member
I wonder what to do when I have Portuguese or Spanish text with accents like ç or ñ and I need to write them in uppercase or in an lower ASCII only font.
In French it's easy, you replace the letter by the non accented version, nobody will mind. In German you replace with the non accented letter and append a "e".
What about Spanish and Portuguese? I was told I can't simply use the non accented letter.
ñ is not an letter with accent, but a new letter. You can't replace an "ñ" with an "n".
But you can replace áéíóú (letters with accent) with aeiou if want to use capital letters.
ASCII seems really outdated nowadays.
In French it's easy, you replace the letter by the non accented version, nobody will mind.
Nobody will mind ? I will for sure. I know the SMS language is taking over, but (thankfully) there are still people who know how to write proper French. We're supposed to keep the accents on capital letters, but even newspapers and book publishers don't bother with that. Hence "nobody will mind". A lot of people are stuck in the past and refuse to move on. But I'm starting to be off-topic, so I'll stop complaining here.
If you have access to an ASCII extended set of characters, you can use all the special characters you mentioned in your first post. If you just have the basic set, then you'll have to replace all the special chars with standard chars. Good luck.
ob1
Member
The problem is that I have a ASCII font in a LabelAtlas and I see no clear way to support languages with special characters.
As I said, French won't really mind, German has a fix, but then it gets complicated.
And I am not even sure I can go beyond the 127 lower ASCII chars with a LabelAtlas (I am on 0.7.3).
Hmm, if you're using LabelAtlas, you could use a trick I guess. Add the special characters you need at the end of the png atlas file. Before doing [label setString:stringToDraw], replace all the special characters in stringToDraw with the characters they should have been in a regular ASCII table (only their "position" - ie the int value representing the char - in the atlas is important). Hope you understand what I mean.
according to:
http://www.asciitable.com/
you have Ñ in the extended ascii table. So you can write any Spanish word in capital letters by using the extended ascii table.
@ob1 :
No, this was not what I meant. An example will speak volumes. This is the atlas png file (charmap) for displaying the FPS counter :
Let's say I want to use this file to display something like "©2009". I first add the extra '©' character in the charmap, like this :
Now, the characters you're supposed to find in a charmap are the following : ./0123456789:;
The trick is to feed the LabelAtlas string with the characters it expects. If I want it to display "©2009", I do :
NSString *stringToDraw = @":2009";
[label setString:stringToDraw];In your case, you could do something like :
NSString *stringToDraw = @"Viva piñata";
// replace here special chars in previous string with the ones expected in a regular charmap
[label setString:stringToDraw];Maybe there's a function to easily replace the special chars with the expected ones (I don't know, I've never needed something like that). I guess It wouldn't be hard to do it manually with an array or something.
ob1
Member
Well Clain, your idea works only if I were not already using all the lower 127 characters. Maybe there is a way to use the ones from 0-31 (\x ?) but I don't know how NSString UTF8String reacts to that. There aren't that many chars that are not useful in the 32-127 area and I was looking for more a clean solution than for a hack.
PS: for some strange reason, some of the characters from my post disappear
I don't see how the 127 characters limit is relevant. You can add more characters after the 128th char.
If you want a clean solution and not a hack, then either drop the idea of displaying UTF8 strings in plain ASCII or use a more complete charmap file for your LabelAtlas, like this one : http://tulrich.com/fonts/images/tuffy-20070211_charmap.png
ob1
Member
> I don't see how the 127 characters limit is relevant. You can add more characters after the 128th char.
I don't understand how I put a character > 127 in my string, that's why I think it is relevant.
// replace here special chars in previous string with the ones expected in a regular charmap
That's all fun and games in a comment, but how does it translate in actual code ?
You can see the charmap from my previous post (tuffy) contains around 200 characters. I think the easiest way would be for you to redo your charmap but not limit it to the first 128 chars. Now, if you can't do that for whatever reason, you'll have to parse your string and replace each character you can't draw with one available in your charmap. It's very easy to do such a thing in PHP with the strtr() function, but there's no equivalent in objective C.
Since you want to see actual code, you might be interested in the following link:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/713918/replace-multiple-characters-in-a-string-in-objective-c
ob1
Member
I know how to replace a character in a string. The point still is, at some point it must become a numerical value >127 (to look up in the atlas) if the charmap has more than 128 characters.
I still claim that there is no way that LabelAtlas will work with other chars than the lower 127 ASCII. Prove me wrong.
Edit: Maybe a simple question will show the problem. Let's imagine I want to use the 128th character in my map. What character do I put in my string to that effect?
Ok, I ran this code snippet to see what a charmap should look like on iPhone OS :
char ch = ' '; // first char
char *str = malloc(17*sizeof(char));
str[16] = '';
for (int l = 0; l < 15; l++) { // lines
for (int c = 0; c < 16; c++) { // columns
str[c] = ch++;
}
NSLog(@"%@", [NSString stringWithCString:str length:16]);
}
free(str);This is the output (it's a screenshot from the console cause I'm not sure this forum can display all these special chars) :
So, theoretically, with a charmap like this one, you should be able to use special chars from the extended ASCII character set and display them with a LabelAtlas. However, there's an issue with character encoding. These special chars are encoded in UTF8 and when the updateAtlasValues function of the LabelAtlas class retrieves the C characters from the string (with const char *s = [string_ UTF8String];), the special chars are now the size of 2 chars each. For instance, the letter "é" is retrieved as "é". But these two characters "é" are displayed correctly by the LabelAtlas, and they're beyond the 128th char in the charmap.
I'd say a workaround is needed to fix the character encoding issue. I tried something like that in updateAtlasValues :
//const char *s = [string_ UTF8String];
char *s = malloc((n+1)*sizeof(char));
[string_ getCString:s maxLength:n+1 encoding:NSEncodingXXX];and played with both the encoding parameter AND the encoding of the .m file, but never got it to work correctly.
ob1
Member
>I'd say a workaround is needed to fix the character encoding issue. I tried something > like that in updateAtlasValues :
> and played with both the encoding parameter AND the encoding of the .m file, but never
> got it to work correctly.
Thanks a lot for the tests... but that's kind of what I have been saying was my problem since the beginning unfortunately.
I guess I could modify LabelAtlas to use C strings with American encoding instead of UTF8, but it's kind of messy. Or I could parse the UTF8 string, but it's trouble too.
Anyways, I guess a "clean" solution will be for my next game only. Thanks for your time.
ob1
Member
I was looking at "BitmapFontAtlas", but I can't even understand how it might possibly work:
.h:
enum { kBitmapFontAtlasMaxChars = 256, };
ccBitmapFontDef bitmapFontArray[kBitmapFontAtlasMaxChars];.m :
unichar c = [string_ characterAtIndex:i];
...
ccBitmapFontDef fontDef = configuration->bitmapFontArray[c];Is anyone using it for characters > 127 ?
ob1
Member
I wonder if replacing:
char a = s[i] - mapStartChar;
with something like
unichar a = ([string_ characterAtIndex:i] %256) - mapStartChar;
In LabelAtlas.m would at allow to use any character. I am still a bit confused with all the subtelties of UTF-8 and UTF-16.
For my previous post, I guess that BitmapFontAtlas works as long as you use the Latin1 set if I understood the code correctly.
However, I am still inclined to think that the code in BitmapFontAtlas is not really correct. It should probably do something like:
unichar c = [string_ characterAtIndex:i] % 256;
Or maybe I am totally mistaken.
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