> I tried to use the Czech font in DirectorMX2004 - but some 
> characters changes to other characters. Even by dynamically 
> loading the text form XML or text files the characters like u 
> changes to u. Please help me with this!

Ah, if you could only wait a couple of months, you could read the
article I just wrote.

In the meantime, I think you're running into a code page problem. Either
that, or you're using Unicode, which Director doesn't support. Flash
does, even in Director--just don't try to pass a Unicode string to or
from Director.

Windows uses ANSI encoding for text--kind of an extension of the old
ASCII encoding. ASCII is a 7-bit standard, and only covers characters
0-127. ANSI defines the other 128 characters. The upper range of ANSI is
where you will find characters like ü, È, and other accented characters
used in Western European languages. Macintosh uses a similar encoding,
but there are some differences in the top 128 characters.

ANSI is essentially the same as ISO 8859-1, or Latin 1, a specification
that defines character codes for just about every Western European
language. And here's the rub--Czech isn't Western European, and isn't
covered by ANSI or ISO 8859-1. It's specified by ISO 8859-2, which
covers Central and Eastern European languages that use the Roman
alphabet (as opposed to, say, Cyrillic or Greek).

Chances are that your font has Czech characters in it, but you can't get
to them. That's because the Czech characters are on code page 1250, and
English Windows, and English Director, uses Code Page 1252. 

Font publishers often include several national character sets--it's
simpler if you can just install Arial, and have Roman 1 on an English
system and Cyrillic on a Russian system. You could imagine a font as a
stack, something like this:
Code Page       ISO 8859
---------   --------
1250            8859-2
1251            8859-5 (Cyrillic)
1252            8859-1 (Latin 1)
1253            8859-7 (Greek)
1254            8859-9 (Turkish)
1255            8859-8 (Hebrew)

And so on--read my article for more details.

Director doesn’t do a good job with anything other than code page 1252,
ISO 8859-1 on Windows, and the corresponding encoding on Macintosh. It's
a shame, really, because I can install a Russian font on my computer and
type a letter in Russian with Word (well, I could if I spoke Russian).

The best work-around I have found is to create a Czech font on code page
1252 and embed it in Director. It's more work than it needs to be, but
at least it works.

Cordially,

Kerry Thompson



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