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Main forum => GLBasic - en => Topic started by: MrTAToad on 2011-Feb-11

Title: Characters greater than ASCII 255
Post by: MrTAToad on 2011-Feb-11
I'll soon be needing to print characters with an ASCII value greater than 255, using DDgui, PRINT and Moru's lovely proportional font system.

The problem is : any idea how !?

Title: Re: Characters greater than ASCII 255
Post by: Slydog on 2011-Feb-11
Hmm, sounds adventurous!

Something like Unicode?
http://www.unicode.org/ (http://www.unicode.org/)
or 'The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)':
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html)

But then how to use that knowledge for your situation!
You could add a character set wrapper around those routines (DDgui, PRINT, Moru's) that takes a character set value as a parameter and set's the appropriate font bitmap as the active one.  I don't know if those routines allow multiple font sets, or how to do that.  (I wrote my own font and gui system so I'm unfamiliar with those).

Or adapt Moru's font system to allow font sets greater than 255, but how many do you need? 
You could easily adapt it to say double that, but that may not be what you want. 
But you could have mixed sets in the same string that way.
You would need to either use a custom 2 byte character 'ascii' value, or custom escape sequences to display ascii > 255 like:
"In Russian it looks like \2 russian text \1, ok?"  The \1 or \2 would specify the ascii page number (1 = 0-255, 2 = 256-511, etc)

Just some thoughts . . .
Title: Re: Characters greater than ASCII 255
Post by: MrTAToad on 2011-Feb-11
I believe Moru's system should be able to cope.  I found out a few minutes ago that a few characters in my key/string file are unicode, but they are being read in as 2 characters- it appears that unicode characters have a $C3 character before them, so it should be easy enough to convert to the appropriate ASCII character - which would avoid the need (so far at any rate) to deal with unicode text...

Title: Re: Characters greater than ASCII 255
Post by: MrTAToad on 2011-Feb-11
Actually found an easier way - re-save the file as ANSI...

I'm hoping that will solve everthing :)