CEGUI (Crazy Eddie's GUI) Forums

Hi,

There's no short answer to that question

Unicode is something that was discussed at length of the Ogre forums as part of the preliminary work for Mk-2. What was decided upon was to initially implement things in such a way that Unicode could be added fairly painlessly at a later stage. At some point in time I would like the system to implement the full Unicode specification (I don't believe in doing things by halves, so if I'm going to have Unicode I'll have it all ).

In keeping with the above goal, the string class within the system does allow some Unicode-like operations, for example it can store the full set of Unicde code-points (string data is passed in via utf8 encoded data buffers). This currently has limitations though, in that all sorting and other such operations do not yet consider strings in a localised manner.

The font system is theoretically capable of handling any glyph available in a TTF font - again, there are currently some limitations. The requested glyphs are buffered onto a single texture - so the total number of glyphs ultimately available from one font is tied to the maximum texture size. At the moment, you need to "forward declare" the glyphs you'll be using for a font, though I am considering adding an option that would automatically add glyphs dynamically as they are first used (no decision on this yet, and this would not be implemented for a little while). Additionally, the font currently supports left to right rendering only.

I believe that even in it's current state, the system could produce acceptable results for many cases, though I do not pretend that it will suffice for all possible scenarios.

How easy to add actual Unicode? Hmmm. Again that depends The full Unicode spec. is a huge and complex beast - to add this properly would take a great deal of effort (not because of anything within the GUI system, but because Unicode is fairly complicated to do right). It would be possible to extend what is currently available without doing full Unicode, the ease of such undertakings would depend upon the skill of the person doing it

Not sure if this answers your question, hopefully it does

CE.

As I understand it, it is already possible, although it might be tricky. I never tried it.

Displaying chinese is already possible although there might be a problem with the number of glyphs available. As the glyphs are stored on a texture and this texture has not an unlimited size, you are limited in the number of glyphs you can use. While it is not really a problem for many languages, it might be for chinese.

Inputing chinese is the tricky part. This is not a trivial task. However, if you are able to inject utf32 encoded characters in CEGUI, you will be fine. I have a fairly limited knowledge of chinese OSes but there might be some way to do that.

Hope that can help (and that I am not wrong)...

NOTE: Two years ago, I had some success with Japanese input using IME on Windows. That was not with CEGUI though but I think it is still applicable (and not that hard by the way). IME can provide you with Unicode strings that you can inject in CEGUI. I don't have a Japanese OS anymore but I just wanted to tell that it is possible. It is a Windows-only solution though .....

Right the thing to remember here is that CEGUI collects no inputs itself, so, as Banania stated, so long as you have a means of generating the keyboard inputs and making sure they're in UTF32 format, then CEGUI is able to accept this and work with it.

HTH

CE.

Are there any plan to support more than one texture for a font ? I don't think one texture would be enough for a realistic application in chinese....

BTW, just seen your chinese demo. Nice work !

Are there any plan to support more than one texture for a font ? I don't think one texture would be enough for a realistic application in chinese....

This has been mentioned before. It's something that I'd like to do at some stage, especially once I start on the full Unicode support (this is a way off though. Btw, I'll hopefully post the roadmap you asked for tomorrow, this will give an idea of the amount of work that's still to do ).

BTW, just seen your chinese demo. Nice work !

Thanks

Btw, I'll hopefully post the roadmap you asked for tomorrow, this will give an idea of the amount of work that's still to do ).

Don't push yourself too much, you're just coming back from holiday

This thread has a link to the demo mentioned.

I think the forum's hyperlink color is the same as regular text so it's hard to see the link in Nihilus' post.
Here is the full URL anyway:
http://crayzedsgui.sourceforge.net/modu ... opic&t=313

Oops sorry, didn't realize how confusing that was when I wrote it!

I think the forum's hyperlink color is the same as regular text so it's hard to see the link

I'll see if I can modify this over the weeked so that links are more clearly displayed. It annoys me as well

CE.