Dealing With The ******** Problem...

[dukarriope]

I just had a communication problem with some people in my room (one who was Japanese and another who I speculate was European/Russian), which was simply the old ****** problem. It might well be time we had this dealt with, and perhaps some code for what is known as character-subbing could be engineered?

 

The other alternative could be more straight forward; I suppose the current font used for the chat UI does not support other languages' characters, so it'd be nice if it was switched to one that did. Like MS Gothic (the Japanese UI already uses this), which happens to also be a lot more readable, ironically. I'm actually able to type in Japanese in the English client, but this still turns up as ***********s, so communication was messed up.

 

So two possible fixes, engineering some proper character substitution or simply changing the font used for chatting to one that has a more all-encompassing character set. It would at least make it possible to discern what language is being spoken, or, perhaps, write a corrigible reply.

[Bitfly]

I'm just gonna take a wild guess and say *****'s appear cause the chat doesn't support the right character encoding. This shouldn't have anything to do with fonts

[buriburi]

****** ** ****** *** ******* *** ****** **** ****** ****

[dukarriope]

I'm just gonna take a wild guess and say *****'s appear cause the chat doesn't support the right character encoding. This shouldn't have anything to do with fonts

That could be true, but if you have a font that doesn't have the characters for the language, it tends to appear as squares. Another solution is to have code to substitute another font for a character that isn't in the currently used font.

You can see this on Android devices - although the font I'm using on my devices do not have Japanese characters, they display correctly in a font that does.

Edited October 2, 2013 by dukarriope