Re: [Flashcoders] MultiLanguage Character support
On Jan 5, 2007, at 12:07 PM, Rey Peralta wrote: I'm currently working on a mini application that will be importing all it's text from an XML source. It needs to work in multiple languages, including English, Spanish, French, Italian, Russian, Hebrew, Japanese, Chinese, and Korean. This combination of characters makes for an interesting problem. I don't think there is one font that includes all those characters!?!? Any advice on how to ensure the display of all characters? The designer chose to go with Univers Condensed, but it does not include all the chars I need to display. Should I use "_sans" or is there another option available to me. Hi Does this application need to display all the languages at the same time? I think the easiest is using _sans and let the user's computer provide the correct match. For a project I did, initially they wanted to a quick "toggle" button to switch languages on on the dime. But it proved problematic so separate SWFs were published with the associated font embedded. (You can leave linkage name the same, just change the font that is is associated with. Of course embedding Japanese will add at least 1MB to your file as others have mentioned.) I think you can embed fonts into separate swfs, like en.swf, jp.swf, etc, for sharing and load it as needed. But for me, using assets that are shared was always a nightmare so I gave up. It may have improved now, I'm not sure. Not sure how much experience you have with multilingual things, but one gotcha to be wary of is that while a layout looks nice with english words, words in other languages are longer or shorter and won't look as nice, IMO. You may need to simply load a set of jpgs (especially for headers which, agreeably, requires pixel perfect letter spacing and other treatments). -robert ___ Flashcoders@chattyfig.figleaf.com To change your subscription options or search the archive: http://chattyfig.figleaf.com/mailman/listinfo/flashcoders Brought to you by Fig Leaf Software Premier Authorized Adobe Consulting and Training http://www.figleaf.com http://training.figleaf.com
Re: [Flashcoders] MultiLanguage Character support
I'm currently working on a mini application that will be importing all > it's text from an XML source. It needs to work in multiple languages, > including English, Spanish, French, Italian, Russian, Hebrew, Japanese, > Chinese, and Korean. This combination of characters makes for an > interesting problem. I don't think there is one font > that includes all those characters!?!? Any advice on how to ensure the display of all characters? The designer > chose to go with Univers Condensed, but it does not include all the > chars I need to display. Should I use "_sans" or is there another > option available to me. This is a complex question. I've had to implement similar solutions a few times, and for me, it goes like this: Roman-based languages like English, Spanish, French and Italian can easily feature only one language. The additional glyphs used by these languages (other than the A-Z letters) are pretty simple, accented characters like áéçüý, and any professional fonts should feature them. So it's not a source of concern. Since you are using other languages - Hebrew, Japanese, Chinese, and Korean - you have a whole different problem in your hands. While *there are* many fonts which include those languages, you usually wouldn't want to include them; a font for a language like Japanese can easily add up to 1mb to your SWF. Also, 'fonts' don't actually translate very well their intentions when they're used on such languages - what would be the difference between a Kanji under Arial and a Kanji under Univers? - and so you'd be better off using a more generic, readable, font (unless it's some kind of huge caption). In a web realistic project, for languages like these, you'd probably have to opt for a different approach altogether: to use the system fonts instead (_sans) on languages such as Japanese and Chinese, and your original, embedded for everything else. So you'd need this: if the selected language is roman-based, simply insert the string into the textfield. If it's nonroman, you insert the string into the textfield, and change the font to "_sans". Visually, this is not ideal, as you won't have antialias (depends on the machine's OS configuration) and you will probably need to use bigger font sizes because of the detail of most characters (a normal Kanji can be unreadable in anything smaller than size 12, not mentioning that sometimes Flash likes to crop text even if there's still plenty of space available). But it's still the best solution when it comes down to proper localization. Also, you can't rotate text made with _sans, or use a different opacity, and scaling is not exactly smooth. In those cases, you'd need to draw the text, capture the textfield into a BitmapData, and then use that bitmap instead. It's not very practical in your case (because you're outputting to Flash 7) but it's the only way to do such a thing. However, if you *really* want to include fonts, using any real professional font like the ones included in Windows (Arial, Tahoma, etc) is a good choice. You can also use the original font (Univers or whatever) for roman text and other like Arial for nonroman text. I hope that helps. Zeh ___ Flashcoders@chattyfig.figleaf.com To change your subscription options or search the archive: http://chattyfig.figleaf.com/mailman/listinfo/flashcoders Brought to you by Fig Leaf Software Premier Authorized Adobe Consulting and Training http://www.figleaf.com http://training.figleaf.com
Re: [Flashcoders] MultiLanguage Character support
Tahoma works for Windows machines too. Again, you have to use device fonts, or else your swf is going to be HGE. --- Rey Peralta <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I'm currently working on a mini application that > will be importing all it's text from an XML source. > It needs to work in multiple languages, including > English, Spanish, French, Italian, Russian, Hebrew, > Japanese, Chinese, and Korean. This combination of > characters makes for an interesting problem. I don't > think there is one font that includes all those > characters!?!? > > Any advice on how to ensure the display of all > characters? The designer chose to go with Univers > Condensed, but it does not include all the chars I > need to display. Should I use "_sans" or is there > another option available to me. > > I'm building this using Flash Pro 8, and will > publish to Flash 7. > > Thanks! > > -r > > > > __ > Do You Yahoo!? > Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam > protection around > http://mail.yahoo.com > ___ > Flashcoders@chattyfig.figleaf.com > To change your subscription options or search the > archive: > http://chattyfig.figleaf.com/mailman/listinfo/flashcoders > > Brought to you by Fig Leaf Software > Premier Authorized Adobe Consulting and Training > http://www.figleaf.com > http://training.figleaf.com > __ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com ___ Flashcoders@chattyfig.figleaf.com To change your subscription options or search the archive: http://chattyfig.figleaf.com/mailman/listinfo/flashcoders Brought to you by Fig Leaf Software Premier Authorized Adobe Consulting and Training http://www.figleaf.com http://training.figleaf.com
Re: [Flashcoders] MultiLanguage Character support
Arial Unicode MS font covers almost the whole Unicode 2.1 character ranges, but it is more than 20MB. It the size matters then use device fonts. Attila ___ Flashcoders@chattyfig.figleaf.com To change your subscription options or search the archive: http://chattyfig.figleaf.com/mailman/listinfo/flashcoders Brought to you by Fig Leaf Software Premier Authorized Adobe Consulting and Training http://www.figleaf.com http://training.figleaf.com
[Flashcoders] MultiLanguage Character support
I'm currently working on a mini application that will be importing all it's text from an XML source. It needs to work in multiple languages, including English, Spanish, French, Italian, Russian, Hebrew, Japanese, Chinese, and Korean. This combination of characters makes for an interesting problem. I don't think there is one font that includes all those characters!?!? Any advice on how to ensure the display of all characters? The designer chose to go with Univers Condensed, but it does not include all the chars I need to display. Should I use "_sans" or is there another option available to me. I'm building this using Flash Pro 8, and will publish to Flash 7. Thanks! -r __ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com ___ Flashcoders@chattyfig.figleaf.com To change your subscription options or search the archive: http://chattyfig.figleaf.com/mailman/listinfo/flashcoders Brought to you by Fig Leaf Software Premier Authorized Adobe Consulting and Training http://www.figleaf.com http://training.figleaf.com
