I, too, will look forward to reading Kerry's article, since he's our leading expert in these things, but in the meantime, don't despair: I've been using Russian in my Director projects for years, with various Cyrillic fonts based on code page 1251 in Windows and Apple Cyrillic on the Mac (both OS 9 and OS X). It's all totally doable, including access to large databases in Russian, all sorts of string manipulation, user input in Ciryllic, and so on, and without using Flash or Unicode. Let me know if you need pointers.
Slava At 10:36 AM 5/18/04 -0400, you wrote: >> 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 [To remove yourself from this list, or to change to digest mode, go to http://www.penworks.com/lingo-l.cgi To post messages to the list, email [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Problems, email [EMAIL PROTECTED]). Lingo-L is for learning and helping with programming Lingo. Thanks!]
