Better support needed for Icelandic letters in chat

[Azari]

Maybe a nitpick, I couldn't help but notice that most common European letters/diacritical marks look fine in COH chat except a few notable ones needed to write Icelandic: Þ/þ  Ð/ð & Ý/ý.  All of these characters look horribly out of place in the chat box. Also for German we have ß but it would be nice to also have ſ (long s) supported. 

[Number Six]

It's probably a font issue because I believe the game has full UTF-8 support. Even experimented with emoji but most look terrible. I'll have to check which font the in-game chat is using by default.

[Rudra]

Just make the font wingdings and call it good.

 

😃

 

Edit: Sorry. Bad joke.

Edited July 14, 2022 by Rudra

[srmalloy]

The game supports Unicode, but the game font has odd holes in the characterset mapping. Ever since I happened to see someone say 'для' in chat back on Live, I started making characters with foreign backgrounds, both to get names easier -- 'Ice Fist' may be taken, but 'Ledyanoy Kulak' (Ледяной Кулак), the same name in Russian, wasn't -- and to have fun with some additional characterization by replacing the binds for stock messages like 'Ready!' with 'native' versions ('Готовый'). However, I found that, probably to save space, the internal font CoH uses only has a limited support for other character groups in the Unicode space, causing some characters to appear as blocks and others not at all.

 

I understand that there's a way to make CoH use a different font file, but I don't know if the increased size of a font that supported more of the Unicode range would cause problems, and replacing the font for your client doesn't change the problem of characters not displaying properly on everyone else's clients.

[Azari]

7 hours ago, srmalloy said:

The game supports Unicode, but the game font has odd holes in the characterset mapping. Ever since I happened to see someone say 'для' in chat back on Live, I started making characters with foreign backgrounds, both to get names easier -- 'Ice Fist' may be taken, but 'Ledyanoy Kulak' (Ледяной Кулак), the same name in Russian, wasn't -- and to have fun with some additional characterization by replacing the binds for stock messages like 'Ready!' with 'native' versions ('Готовый'). However, I found that, probably to save space, the internal font CoH uses only has a limited support for other character groups in the Unicode space, causing some characters to appear as blocks and others not at all.

 

I understand that there's a way to make CoH use a different font file, but I don't know if the increased size of a font that supported more of the Unicode range would cause problems, and replacing the font for your client doesn't change the problem of characters not displaying properly on everyone else's clients.

It would be fun to make a medieval type character þat ſpoke wiþ Middle Engliſh-eſque orþography too. Þey ſhould alſo add þe letter Ȝ/ȝ (yogh)! 😁

Edited July 15, 2022 by Azari

[WanderingAries]

On 7/15/2022 at 12:37 PM, srmalloy said:

The game supports Unicode, but the game font has odd holes in the characterset mapping. Ever since I happened to see someone say 'для' in chat back on Live, I started making characters with foreign backgrounds, both to get names easier -- 'Ice Fist' may be taken, but 'Ledyanoy Kulak' (Ледяной Кулак), the same name in Russian, wasn't -- and to have fun with some additional characterization by replacing the binds for stock messages like 'Ready!' with 'native' versions ('Готовый'). However, I found that, probably to save space, the internal font CoH uses only has a limited support for other character groups in the Unicode space, causing some characters to appear as blocks and others not at all.

 

I understand that there's a way to make CoH use a different font file, but I don't know if the increased size of a font that supported more of the Unicode range would cause problems, and replacing the font for your client doesn't change the problem of characters not displaying properly on everyone else's clients.

 

This, you can use the characters in some places, but not in others. Like, I can basically write what I want in the bio, but not all of that works in the chat (IIRC). Same goes for character names I believe. I think the difference is that the bio doesn't interact with functional aspects of the rest of the game, so it's just a text file/string basically.

[srmalloy]

1 hour ago, WanderingAries said:

 

This, you can use the characters in some places, but not in others. Like, I can basically write what I want in the bio, but not all of that works in the chat (IIRC). Same goes for character names I believe. I think the difference is that the bio doesn't interact with functional aspects of the rest of the game, so it's just a text file/string basically.

I haven't had any cases where I've been able to use text in a character's bio, but not in chat -- and for most of my characters with non-English-speaking backgrounds, I've taken to making up chat popmenus with stock responses in their native language -- 'congratulations', 'thanks for the team', 'thanks for the invitation', etc. -- plus some insults to use against hostiles in combat. The biggest annoyance I've had is that, since Unicode characters are 16 bits, while ASCII is 8 bits, each Unicode character takes up two spaces in the bio, shrinking the 1023-character limit further and forcing me to be more penurious about using words in other scripts -- for example, the I. M. Sechenov Institute of Evolutionary Physiology and Biochemistry ('Институт Эволюционной Физиологии и биохимии имени И.М. Сеченова') is a tenth of the bio space all by itself.

[Azari]

It would be nice to make an option in-game to change þe chat font to any font on your PC.  Noto Sans or Noto Sans Bold would be ideal options, containing juſt about any character you could poſſibly want.   It would be intereſting at hiȝer ſcreen reſolutions to try a ſerif face like Garamond Premier Pro Caption or Elſtob.

Edited July 29, 2022 by Azari

[srmalloy]

On 7/29/2022 at 12:35 AM, Azari said:

It would be nice to make an option in-game to change þe chat font to any font on your PC.  Noto Sans or Noto Sans Bold would be ideal options, containing juſt about any character you could poſſibly want.   It would be intereſting at hiȝer ſcreen reſolutions to try a ſerif face like Garamond Premier Pro Caption or Elſtob.

See Give your UI a facelift: replacing the CoH fonts with your own in the forums. It's not neat, but it's doable.

 

Replacing the default font with 'Snubfighter', a poor choice for its lack of distinguishable upper- and lower-case letters:

 

Trying again with 'Enigmatic Unicode Regular' produces a much better result:

Edited July 30, 2022 by srmalloy
added examples

[srmalloy]

I should point out that, while you can change your game fonts for more readability or wider glyph support, doing so only changes the appearance of the game in your client. If you change the game fonts so that they support glyphs not in the standard game fonts, then while you will see any of the 'new' glyphs you use in your chat, bio, or other locations , everyone else will just see a hollow box. It would take a global replacement of the standard chat font with, say, Arial Unicode MS (which has over 50,000 glyphs, but is a 22Mb file) for extended character support to be available both for you and the other players reading your text.

 

[Azari]

On 7/30/2022 at 8:09 PM, srmalloy said:

I should point out that, while you can change your game fonts for more readability or wider glyph support, doing so only changes the appearance of the game in your client. If you change the game fonts so that they support glyphs not in the standard game fonts, then while you will see any of the 'new' glyphs you use in your chat, bio, or other locations , everyone else will just see a hollow box. It would take a global replacement of the standard chat font with, say, Arial Unicode MS (which has over 50,000 glyphs, but is a 22Mb file) for extended character support to be available both for you and the other players reading your text.

 

So it would by poſſible to include an extended character ſet in a future update...! But how many people would miſs þe original typeface?  It would have to be an option to ſwitch back to þe original chat font.