DIR7 Character Set Problem / Foreign Language

[swampcore]

Hi there,

I am working on an app built using Director 7 that until now has used the
standard English (latin-1) character set.

However, I am required to deliver a new version including some elements
displayed in a second language, in this case Welsh, which uses characters
outside of the normal set. I believe those required are included in Latin-1
Extended, otherwise in Unicode as a whole, obviously.

I am having specific problems with two characters that appear to be missing
from Latin-1, which are: ? and ? (w-circumflex, and y-circumflex [i think!]).

In a standard text box I create using Director, I am unable either to paste
either character in, or enter it using its ALT+combination, let alone save to
the associated database.

I have read that Dir 11 is the first version with full Unicode support - which
surprises me - however I would assume that someone would likely have hit this,
or a similar issue before the release of this version and was wondering if
there is a possible solution without upgrade.

My possible thinking is either a declaration that allows change of a Charset,
as I might do in XHTML for example, or deployment of an Xtra that allows me to
use a different character set.

If anyone could shed some light on the matter, it would be very helpful!
Thanks in advance!
Rich.

[Darrel Hoffman]

Yes, this was always a problem for years. Back when I was dong this, we had
some projects that needed text displayed in various languages. Each
language presented its own challenges. Things like Greek weren't too bad,
because the Symbol font works for most Greek text. (Only problem was the
's' version of Sigma, which had to switch back to Times New Roman.) Various
eastern European languages (Polish, Czech, Hungarian, etc.) posed a problem
with some of the accents that were not available in standard font sets. We
were forced to live without some of the more exotic accents, but were told
that it would still be readable without them, if not exactly correct. This
would probably be the closest to your situation, from what little I know
about Welsh. It could be worse, though. Hebrew and Arabic were challenging
as they are written right-to-left, and thus had to have code written to
input them backwards. Russian was also tough, as the Cyrillic alphabet has
more characters than the others, but I was able to find a font to fake it.
(It replaced some of the lesser-used standard characters in order to fill in
all the letters, which unfortunately meant that in the rare cases where
those characters *were* needed, we had to improvise.) The hardest by far
were any east Asian languages. In that case, I gave up on trying to display
any of the text in text form, and just converted it all to bitmaps. Without
Unicode, trying to display Mandarin or Japanese or Korean correctly as text
is pretty much impossible.