Ideas for complex language display (japanese, chinese, thai)

[mike64b]

Hi,
I'm wondering if anyone has had a work around or solution to displaying complex character languages like japanese, chinese, or thai on the picaso displays. The limitation seems to be the fact that only 256 characters can be had in one font. With many of these languages, there are much more than just 256 characters.
The only ideas i've had are splitting a font into multiple font files (difficult but possible) but that also would be a headache to display text with. The other possibility might be converting fonts to text bit map files like bitfontcreator does, however I am unsure how these might be displayed considering there is no gfx_Bitmap command...perhaps there is some way to read in the file at a specific offset (relevent to the character to be displayed) and then set the pixels based off the code in the file..

Let me know your thoughts,

Thanks
Mike

[gregorbader]

Hi,

The current method for fonts is very limited, as there is a limit how big characters can be and therefor it would be hard to display complex characters clearly.
I therefor have developed a BitmapFont Library on my own which uses the characters stored in an gci file and display these with gfx_Image().

This way I can have chars any size and even colored, textured and antialiased. Only limitation is, that they currently have no transparent background (will hopefully be solved in near future).

regards,
Gregor

[mike64b]

What was your method for converting characters to bitmap images? seems like it would take an extraordinary amount of time if doing individually and not batch processing it.

[gregorbader]

Yes, this was a big topic!I searched a lot and tried different existing bitmap font tools, which are all crap because they generate a single file and do not respect the character spacings!
I finally come to a solution with using ImageMagick and a batch file for character generation (which i have attached). Afterwards i generated the gci file with Graphic Composer and wrote a small command line tool for packing all together.
Batch file is called with e.g. "font_convert.bat Arial 72" to generate Arial 72pt bitmaps.
regards,Gregor Attached files font_convert.zip (1009 B)