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Unicode, foreign languages, and custom fonts

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    Unicode, foreign languages, and custom fonts

    I'm creating a custom font for my project. I've been putting a lot of effort into it and I have yet more effort to go.

    Thinking ahead, when the project is done I might want it available in more than English. I don't know if I will have the option to release this internationally, but I am willing to spend a day or two to make it a possibility. That being said I will want the font I use to be capable of supporting various languages. Now I am not going to bother with the various Asian scripts because that is too far beyond me, but I do want to include all of the Latin characters so that I will have complete support of all the Latin-based languages. After all, including a few simple extra characters to enable a whole language would be worth the effort.
    So I created a custom font and imported it into Unreal Ed. And while I thought I got most of the glyphs that I could want, I still find that the font appears with two large sections of characters that I failed to create.

    I checked Unicode on Wikipedia and these characters are given two or three letter designations that I have no idea what they mean. I *assume* these are not printed characters so I don't need to worry about them, although that just makes me wonder why UDK still prints them on the character sheet if they will never be seen. Still, I would like to hear from a reliable source what those missing characters are for.

    But the bigger question I have is something I cannot answer for myself: did I get all the characters I need? Like I said, I am not going to bother with languages that require a completely foreign set of characters, but I do want to enable as many languages as I can.
    Now since no one can clearly tell what "enough" is, I suppose what I'm really asking is:
    What languages will these characters fully support? What languages will not be supported with this current set? and what would I need to create to support those languages?
    It looks like I have everything through Unicode 00FF. (excluding the first 32 characters, and 007F-00A0)

    #2
    Perhaps I should ask about some specific languages?

    These are the languages that Steam supports that appear to use the same set of Latin characters:
    (I've seen enough of the first three to believe that they are fully supported, but I never studied any of them extensively enough to know if there are a few other symbols that do get used, just very infrequently.)

    Spanish
    German
    French
    Italian
    Danish
    Swedish
    Norwegian
    Czech
    Finnish
    Hungarian
    Polish
    Portuguese
    Romanian
    Turkish

    Surely there must be someone on this forum who speaks/writes at least one of those languages well?

    I know Russian uses a set of characters beyond that range, and I can easily look up online and see their thirty-some-odd character alphabet. I can find those characters in my font program in a section called "cyrllic" but it also includes over 200 other glyphs. I don't know how many of those characters are actually used in Russian, or if they use the same punctuation, etc. Bulgarian and Greek appear to use some of the same symbols, but I have no idea regarding the extent of either.

    Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and Thai use characters too foreign to me for me to draw correctly.

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      #3
      Believe it or not, there are plenty of Asian languages that use Latin text, like Filipino (Tagalog) and Vietnamese, and others from Southeast Asia that have had Latin-based influences throughout their histories. Perhaps these should be supported.

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        #4
        I don't see these on Steam, though. Since I would be releasing my game on Steam I don't see why I would support a language that it doesn't.
        But thank you for the information.

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          #5
          A google for the respective alphabets will give you the answer for what unique letters each language has at least.

          But anyway, Norwegian and Danish uses Æ,Ø,Å, (LowerCase Respectively æ,ø,å) Swedish uses Å, Ä, Ö (å, ä, ö).

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            #6
            Thank you for the information, Graylord. I assume those are the only only extra characters needed for Danish and Swedish?
            They are covered already in the range I have, which is:

            ! " # $ % & ' ( ) * + , - . /
            0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 : ; < = > ?
            @ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O
            P Q R S T U V W X Y Z [ \ ] ^ _
            ` a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o
            p q r s t u v w x y z { | } ~
            ¡ ¢ £ ¤ ¥ ¦ § ¨ © ª « ¬ ® ¯
            ° ± ² ³ ´ µ ¶ · ¸ ¹ º » ¼ ½ ¾ ¿
            À Á Â Ã Ä Å Æ Ç È É Ê Ë Ì Í Î Ï
            Ð Ñ Ò Ó Ô Õ Ö × Ø Ù Ú Û Ü Ý Þ ß
            à á â ã ä å æ ç è é ê ë ì í î ï
            ð ñ ò ó ô õ ö ÷ ø ù ú û ü ý þ ÿ

            Not to mention I was already singling out æ as I was planning on using it in one of the names in my story. It's *technically* used in English and I wanted to give that name an archaic feel.
            Again, thanks for the info!

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