About French accents

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Hi again ! I just tried your new font and it works like a charm, thanks a
bunch for your quick answer and help, this is so marvelous I'm gonna cry :D

I'm now able to translate the whole thing in French which is great ! But to
tell the truth, I had another problem while trying to reconvert the txt
file into a script file, which is why I'm opening another issue. I tried
writing all French accents (éèêëàâùûôçî) and it returned an error 
message.
I assume they are missing from the font, so may it be possible to add them ?

Original issue reported on code.google.com by GreatSka...@gmail.com on 12 Apr 2009 at 1:09

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Short answer is no.

Long answer is no, not without serious sacrifices. Game uses full-width font -- 
each
character's length is twice as much as you want it to be. So unless we want our 
text
too look ｌ　ｉ　ｋ　ｅ　　　ｔ　ｈ　ｉ　ｓ, we must resort to 
some tricks. I
modified font in a way that each in-game character actually has two characters 
from
our latin alphabet in it -- like, "aa" is a single character, "mn" is too; so 
this
way, even if game is only able to work with fullwidth characters, text still 
looks
pretty. Say, to display word "less", we display character "le", and then "ss". 
There
are total of 8883 characters in game font, 6879 of them already taken for kanji 
and
others from jis (actually, I have the table I generated earlier, see 
attachment).
That leaves us with 2004 characters we can use for our dirty localization 
needs(empty
cells in table). Now, English alphabet has 26 letters. We at need a combination 
of
any two lowercase letters (i.e., characters "aa", "ab", "ac", ..., "zy", "zz") -
26*26=676 away from 2004 we have. We also need all combinations of one uppercase
letter and one lowercase letter ("Aa", "Ab", ..., "Zz") - 676 away once again.
Remaining 652 are used on punctuation (a lot of it, too). Imagine we add 11 more
letters (éèêëàâùûôçî): 37*37=1369. Multiply that by 2 for uppercase 
and even
combinations of all letters won't fit.

If you still want accents (though everyone (including me!) would be much 
happier if
you translated it to english. We have a project page set up --
http://www.tsukuru.info/tlwiki/index.php?title=Idolmaster_SP -- in case you 
didn't
know), there is an obvious solution to this problem -- remove kanji from font 
-- this
is localization after all. Untranslated parts of game will look ugly though. If 
you
want that, I can make some modifications to font generator and write 
instructions on
how to use it.

If this seems like too much hassle right now, I can modify script encoder so 
that it
converts éèêëàâùûôçî to eeeeaauuoci. This way, even though they 
won't show up in
game, you still may write with accents, and you will also have an option to 
remove
kanji from font and have all 8k characters for yourself when translation is 
done.

Original comment by andrey.o...@gmail.com on 12 Apr 2009 at 2:33

• Changed state: Feedback

[GoogleCodeExporter]

This is an attachment I forgot.

Original comment by andrey.o...@gmail.com on 12 Apr 2009 at 2:35

Attachments:

• sjis.html

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I understand what you explained, why you kept all kanji and why room is missing 
for
my beloved accents. I can live without them for the time being, but as they are 
part
of our language it will be great if in the end, they can be displayed within 
the game.

I'll be happy to help on translating it into english, but as I already 
mentionned I'm
not a native english speaker, so you'll have to bear with that and maybe 
correct a
few mistakes or change things so that they sound more natural.

As I started playing with Makoto, I think I'll go on playing and then translate 
her
part of the story. (provided my japanese level is enough !)

Original comment by GreatSka...@gmail.com on 12 Apr 2009 at 4:13