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MausTec / edge-o-matic-3000

Firmware for the Edge-o-Matic 3000
GNU General Public License v3.0
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Add Simplified Chinese json #64

Closed PupNewton closed 6 months ago

PupNewton commented 7 months ago

Just an aside, it seems the json file doesn't contain strings used in sub-menus? Is there an ETA when that would be added?

MauAbata commented 6 months ago

Thank you for this contribution! I will have to regenerate the JSON file to include all the new strings, and ensure that many parts of the UI use localized strings!

Regrettably, I do not actually think we have the technical capabilities to display Chinese characters at the current resolution of our display. I ran into this issue when translating the device into Japanese. For the latter, I have found a half-width Katakana font which was created to solve the issue of pixel density, but I am not aware of any equivalent options for clearly displaying Chinese characters within the same space.

If you have any insight into how devices with such low resolution (128x64px) displays can clearly render Chinese characters, please let me know! I am curious how other small electronics manage this solution.

PupNewton commented 6 months ago

I see. I took a quick look into other solutions, and one came up which is a program that converts any installed font to a dot-matrix compatible set. It's doccumented here.

However, the documentation points out that Hanzi characters should have a minimum size of 12x12 pixels. I was able to verify this by using a software called PCtoLCD2002. Assuming the same font height as the english text (7px), there are no feasable ways to make Chinese characters legible.

Chinese translation for "Edging". Legible at 12x12.
Same text. Not legible at 7x7.

I also thought about using Pinyin as a substitute. However, Chinese has a great extent of homophones, which makes text written in Pinyin very hard to read. The user experience of reading Pinyin characters won't be far off from using some basic understandings of English + translation software.

I am going to close this PR for now since we can't display the translation. In the future if there are UI redesigns that can accomodate taller text we might be able to pick it up again.