Hacker News Reader

Comment by babuskov | Hacker News Reader

> Imagine writing a game. Everything works nice and dandy with your ASCII format and now your boss approaches you and wants to distribute the game for the asian market!

You just make sure all translated text is in UTF-8, and use Google Noto fonts for those languages. All game engines I know render UTF-8 text without problems if you supply a font that has the needed glyphs.

Source: I'm and indie game developer and have recently localized my game to Chinese. The game is a mix of RPG and roguelike, so it has a lot of text (over 10000 words). I used SDL_TTF to render text. Precisely: TTF_RenderUTF8_Blended() function. The only issue I had is with multiline/wrapped text. SDL_TTF doesn't break lines on Chinese punctuation characters (.,;:!?) so I would search+replace strings at runtime to add a regular space characters after those.

View on HN

> SDL_TTF doesn't break lines on Chinese punctuation characters (.,;:!?)

Those aren't Chinese punctuation characters. Chinese punctuation characters are full-width, including the spacing that should follow them (or in the case of "(", precede) within the glyph itself: （。，；：！？）. (You may also notice that the period is radically different.) Chinese text should almost never include space characters.

Chinese applications seem happy to break lines anywhere including in the middle of a word, but punctuation seems like an especially good place for a line break, so I'm confused why SDL_TTF would go out of its way to avoid breaking there.

It sounds more like a bug in SDL_TTF than a deliberate attempt to not break the line on Chinese punctuation marks.

I wonder if SDL_TTF works with Unicode Zero-Width Space (U+200B). If so, that would probably be the right choice.

> Those aren't Chinese punctuation characters.

I know, I meant the actual ones you wrote above.

> I'm confused why SDL_TTF would go out of its way to avoid breaking there.

SDL_TTF doesn't break at all. If you have a long Chinese text which uses proper punctuation characters, it would never break, because it only breaks on ASCII whitespace.

I wanted to avoid breaking lines in the middle of a word, so I added extra "regular" space characters to force breaking the line.

You don't really need to only break on punctuation. There is no convention to do so and so long as you so not break any logograms in half, the resulting text reads perfectly fine. In fact, the convention is to have left and right justified text with equal numbers of monospaced logograms, including punctuation, on each line (on the equivalent for vertical text). Classical Chinese before the 20 th century was seldom punctuated.

I wasn't aware of this. Thanks.

>You just make sure all translated text is in UTF-8, and use Google Noto fonts for those languages. All game engines I know render UTF-8 text without problems if you supply a font that has the needed glyphs.

The game could have used a custom engine (like tons of games do), or the requirement could include e.g. Arabic or some such RTL text, further messing up the display...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com