Some tips about fonts

[FC2 liga - poredak]

FC2 liga - poredak

FC2 League - Stats and Ladder

IL-2 League - Stats and Ladder

[cfz8688]

First of all,DCS can not display chinese in the game or GUI if you don't replace the fonts from"\Ka-50\BlackShark\themes\fonts".After you replace them with chinese fonts like simsun.tff, you will see all the chinese can be display but all the russian,like the name of the villages can not be dispaly.So the only way is to replace them with "microsoft yahei",a font from Windows vista,which can display all the words correctly in the GUI.

This tip maybe useful for japanese or korean players.

I still can't find a way to display chinese in the game,I tried all the fonts and codes,ANSI,UNICODE,UTF-8.......I need help......

[BabaLooey]

I think that DejaVu font do not have support for chinese characters?

http://news.cnet.com/2300-7345_3-6092561-1.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DejaVu_fonts
http://sourceforge.net/projects/dejavu/

And this is their wiki page:
http://dejavu.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

btw, dejavu is preffered font on Linux, especially Fedora - you may try to do some further research on how it is done there. Is it workin in PO? I mean, are your chars correctl displayed in UTF-8? Sadly I do not know much about your codepage, apart that there are many problems 

It looks like you will have to change setting for font, not font itself. In LO it was easy, as there was a font config file htat actually worked, but here I cannot make it work. Having similiar problem with CRO characters, and Boberros with Polish and ZaltysZ with Lithuanian, and currently only solution seems to be to editi TGA files, but that is kinda complicated. I rather use windows fonts.

Question - have you ever tried to change font in LO and what were the results?

[cfz8688]

well .....I'm pretty sure the original font cannot support chinese。The size of a typical chinese font is about 10MB but the size of the original fonts is only about 300KB.Further more,if I change some chinese into the original font,it will only display squares,another typical sign of not supporting chinese

I found another problem,after I localized the cockpit tooltips(only added a few chinese word to test),the cockpit cannot be click by mouse anymore. Things became even worse after I localized the ABRIS:DCS will shut down when I tried to start the game

I will keep trying and figure out why.......chinese is completely different from english and russian.....

[BabaLooey]

Are you able to insert your font into PO file? Could you attach one here?

[ZaltysZ]

You can't localize anything in 3D world if you don't have right tga+txt fonts. This is true for ABRIS, tooltips, chat and etc.


< ------         ------ >
  spojene poruke
< ------         ------ >

cfz8688 asked me, so I will provide more information for our Asian friends:

To translate 3D world text, you will need to change fonts in ../FUI/Fonts folder. For more information look into http://lockonhr.com/forum/index.php?topic=1053.0 thread.

I wrote a program which makes those fonts (look that thread, mentioned above). You need to download it and edit 2 files jobs.txt and code.txt. In jobs.txt you must use TTF fonts which do support your language (probably you will need to substitute them with something which looks similar). After that, you will need to edit code.txt and add decimal codes of characters of your language in UTF-8. After you have completed these steps, run make.bat and you will get your fonts.

P.S.: don't forget to use UTF-8. UTF-16 won't work.

[cfz8688]

cfz8688 asked me, so I will provide more information for our Asian friends:

To translate 3D world text, you will need to change fonts in ../FUI/Fonts folder. For more information look into http://lockonhr.com/forum/index.php?topic=1053.0 thread.

I wrote a program which makes those fonts (look that thread, mentioned above). You need to download it and edit 2 files jobs.txt and code.txt. In jobs.txt you must use TTF fonts which do support your language (probably you will need to substitute them with something which looks similar). After that, you will need to edit code.txt and add decimal codes of characters of your language in UTF-8. After you have completed these steps, run make.bat and you will get your fonts.

P.S.: don't forget to use UTF-8. UTF-16 won't work.

Well,as you said in the the other thread,for english or russian,you only have to put in all the characters(less than 100) then it will be fine.But for chinese you must input over 2000 characters(this is noly the number of the characters which is useful for DCS localization,to support chat in chinese,the number will over 80000 )this will certainly course lots of problems....So,thank you for your help and your excellent program,but I'm afraid I have to give up localizing the 3D part......

[ZaltysZ]

You don't need to include all characters. Include only ones which are used in localized strings. As for chat, I guess you will have a problem. However, you may try to use as small font as possible for it to get smallest possible tga.

[cfz8688]

You don't need to include all characters. Include only ones which are used in localized strings. As for chat, I guess you will have a problem. However, you may try to use as small font as possible for it to get smallest possible tga.

I picked about 500 most useful characters in DCS and I used your program,is it should be look like this(picture above)?There are lots of characters I've never seen,are they Lithuanian characters?What the original character looklike?
After I ran your program,there're 36 txt files in the output folder,and after I copied them into 1C\Eagle Dynamics\Ka-50\FUI\Fonts and replace the original txt file,DCS can't even display english,and still can't display chinese.....I'm really puzzled.

[ZaltysZ]

In codes.txt you need to writes all CODES, which belong to characters you will use. For example: 32 - space, 65 - capital Latin letter 'A' and etc. You must write all codes by yourself: add range 32-127; and range with required Chinese characters. If you don't know the codes, Windows Character Map Application will help (just don't forget that it shows codes in hexadecimal, and codes.txt must be in decimal). Also, jobs.txt must contain only TTF fonts which support characters in codes.txt or you will get squares. In addition, make sure you are using editor capable of UTF-8 for localizing files, or you will get... em, garbage.

[cfz8688]

In codes.txt you need to writes all CODES, which belong to characters you will use. For example: 32 - space, 65 - capital Latin letter 'A' and etc. You must write all codes by yourself: add range 32-127; and range with required Chinese characters. If you don't know the codes, Windows Character Map Application will help (just don't forget that it shows codes in hexadecimal, and codes.txt must be in decimal). Also, jobs.txt must contain only TTF fonts which support characters in codes.txt or you will get squares. In addition, make sure you are using editor capable of UTF-8 for localizing files, or you will get... em, garbage.

Some progress,but not good enough....I added 32-127 and chinese characters but still can't display
I did what you said and got the right tga+txt file(at least I think so),but as Babalui said there're still some txt file missing:

font_cockpit_rus.tga
font_cockpit_usa.tga
font_dejavu_lgc_sans_24.tga
font_dejavu_lgc_sans_condensed_Bold_17.tga
font_dejavu_lgc_sans_condensed_Bold_19.tga
font_frugal_sans_21.tga
font_frugal_sans_45.tga
font_gost_type_a_12.tga

Do I need to edit them myself or let them go?

[BabaLooey]

After creating and copying your font to BS, have you tried to "remove" your translation and use that font in regular English from BS?

As for missing fonts, open jobs.txt and insert additional line. For example, lines that started with dot, like:

.\fonts\dejavulgcsanscondensed.ttf 15 10 .\input\codes.txt .\output\font_dejavu_lgc_sans_condensed_15

... were not working (font was not created). So, I've installed DejaVu fonts directly into Windz, and edited line to look like this:

c:\windows\fonts\dejavulgcsanscondensed.ttf 13 10 1 .\input\codes.txt .\output\font_dejavu_lgc_sans_condensed_15.tga

Create new jobs.txt and try to make at least one OK font working with BS.

[cfz8688]

First thing I did is tried to run DCS in english mod,doesn't work,so was chinese.

I will try what you said......is it OK if I don't use dejavu fonts?

As I said above,I replaced all the fonts in DCS to MSYH fonts(renamed then as dejavu fonts)

[BabaLooey]

So, it is working at least in the initial menus (settings, etc)?

I guess ED wanted to keep such localizations out of the game, as there could be issues related to MP communication between clients and servers. We will see how is that solved in upcomming Western edition

I think you can use any font you like as input, just keep thier output names unchanged. Otherwise you will have to tinker with configuration files that call this fonts up.

There is one, very primitive approach to solve at least a part of the problem... Take a closer look at the screens. Most of them are unique. Those that are - edit them directly. I mean, use paint porgram to write directly on the screens, and in PO leave blank translation. Just like you would do with cockpit.

[cfz8688]

The fact is in GUI it just work perfect,in 3D world can't work(good news is localizing GUI and  localizing 3D is two different parts,so players in China can at least have a localized GUI,in fact we are planning release chinese GUI soon)

Now I'm trying to read ZaltysZ's program and find out where is the problem,I think the missing TXT files(the one which ZaltysZ's program can't create)is the problem.

In Croatian localization program,after you put all 36 txt files in \Ka-50\FUI\Fonts and translated Hint_localizer.lua then all the hints can be displayed just fine?

[Boberros]

Isn't Chinese read from top to down?

[BabaLooey]

The fact is in GUI it just work perfect,in 3D world can't work(good news is localizing GUI and  localizing 3D is two different parts,so players in China can at least have a localized GUI,in fact we are planning release chinese GUI soon)

Oh, well, that looks great. Good idea to leave parts in English, but can shorten them a lot. For example, EEG is acronym for Eletronic Engine Governor (same as ECU  - Electronic Control Unit on cars) and you may drop the "Eletronic Engine Governor" part and leave EEG only. Same goes for "Electrical power Ground power AC" - JEEZ!! "Electrical power external AC" or "Electric - AC external".
Also, to make a point about bad Ru-ENG translation, it is not "ejecting system", but "ejection system".

Now I'm trying to read ZaltysZ's program and find out where is the problem,I think the missing TXT files(the one which ZaltysZ's program can't create)is the problem.
In Croatian localization program,after you put all 36 txt files in \Ka-50\FUI\Fonts and translated Hint_localizer.lua then all the hints can be displayed just fine?

Not realy, as I was not able to figure out how to force displaying of hints in a certain lang. If I change ENG part of the string, RU appears, and other way around... Again, with so much other work to be done (Flight Manual), I'll rather wait ro Western edition to compare the diffs - if the hints will be in langs other then ENG.