Charset, Font, Color in Books

[a5810]

It’s trivial, however, I’ve encountered some issues:

* The default font of letters is serif (which one’s it, exactly?). I’ve written a design of original library in the book, and expected that it’s easy to look at the design, but the outcome was unexpected. Should san-serif be added?
* The character set is ASCII. When i pasted the messages in the community to the book, the single quotes character, ‘\”, was printed as ‘\u2019’ in minetest 5.4.1 on linux, but some blanks characters, ‘ ‘, in minetest 5.6.1 on windows. A player will less likely use Greek or Chinese to write. Should the unicode character set be supported?
* The foreground color is white, and the background color is, well, … Should the standard colors be supported? (standard colors in terminal).
* Should the encoding of content be UTF-8?

If the chat can be customized, how about in-game books?

[gd2shoe]

Are they still having issues with unicode?

Is unicode desirable?  Yes.  Should you put in the effort to design a weird gimmicky texture hack to get around unicode bugs?  I don’t think so.

[a5810]

I’m not familiar with the unicode bugs, but no, it isn’t worth to add unicode. Beside, coffeeScryer did the same thing as i did but the words were displayed correctly.

[gd2shoe]

I’m sorry, but I’m having trouble parsing.

I’m not familiar with the unicode bugs, but no, it isn’t.

Isn’t what? Isn’t a unicode bug? Isn’t incomplete unicode support in Minetest? Isn’t something else?

• Your description seems like a bug in unicode support. At best, the font doesn’t support unicode. At worst, there’s a lack of unicode support in the server or render client.
• A search for “unicode” at contentdb currently shows 2 mods, both uploaded or updated recently. Both of them use tga_encoder to push a texture to the client. This doesn’t sound like Minetest unicode support to me, but a workaround.
• You seem to know how to change fonts in Minetest in a mod, and that has me curious. The api seems to only accept ‘normal’ and ‘mono’. It looks like a game might be able to ship with a replacement font and reference it in minetest.conf, but I haven’t played with this. BEWARE font licenses!

Beside, coffeeScryer did the same thing as i did but the words were displayed correctly.

I’m not familiar with whatever coffeeScryer may have done, and I don’t see it after a few searches. I’m not sure what you’re referring to, and I can’t compare yours and his to see what’s different.

To address your initial questions directly:

• “Should san-serif be added?” — Purely a matter of opinion. I say yes, but have no strong feelings. At low res, I think sans-serif is generally better.
• “Should the unicode character set be supported?” — If you feel like dedicating the effort to it. I think it would be better to insist that the Minetest platform adopt unicode support. This is under my belief that it doesn’t. I’d be happy to be wrong about this.
• “Should the standard colors be supported?” — Yes. Aren’t they? I haven’t compared terminal colors to the colors offered by Minetest, but text coloring is one of the things that the engine and rederer do support. Of course, if you go the tga_encoder route, then you’ll either be at the mercy of the encoder, or you’ll need to inject color yourself (before or after the encode phase).
• “Should the encoding of content be UTF-8?” — Preferably, yes. It’s the most common unicode encoding, and English is normally searchable even if it’s being read by a program that only understands ASCII. Any unicode text editor that can’t deal with UTF-8 is sorely lacking. (UTF-16 is annoying, and I’ve never seen UTF-32 in the wild.)

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