I'm currently working on a mini application that will be importing all
> it's text from an XML source. It needs to work in multiple languages,
> including English, Spanish, French, Italian, Russian, Hebrew, Japanese,
> Chinese, and Korean. This combination of characters makes for an
> interesting problem. I don't think there is one font
> that includes all those characters!?!?
Any advice on how to ensure the display of all characters? The designer
> chose to go with Univers Condensed, but it does not include all the
> chars I need to display. Should I use "_sans" or is there another
> option available to me.
This is a complex question. I've had to implement similar solutions a
few times, and for me, it goes like this:
Roman-based languages like English, Spanish, French and Italian can
easily feature only one language. The additional glyphs used by these
languages (other than the A-Z letters) are pretty simple, accented
characters like áéçüý, and any professional fonts should feature them.
So it's not a source of concern.
Since you are using other languages - Hebrew, Japanese, Chinese, and
Korean - you have a whole different problem in your hands. While *there
are* many fonts which include those languages, you usually wouldn't want
to include them; a font for a language like Japanese can easily add up
to 1mb to your SWF. Also, 'fonts' don't actually translate very well
their intentions when they're used on such languages - what would be the
difference between a Kanji under Arial and a Kanji under Univers? - and
so you'd be better off using a more generic, readable, font (unless it's
some kind of huge caption).
In a web realistic project, for languages like these, you'd probably
have to opt for a different approach altogether: to use the system fonts
instead (_sans) on languages such as Japanese and Chinese, and your
original, embedded for everything else.
So you'd need this: if the selected language is roman-based, simply
insert the string into the textfield. If it's nonroman, you insert the
string into the textfield, and change the font to "_sans".
Visually, this is not ideal, as you won't have antialias (depends on the
machine's OS configuration) and you will probably need to use bigger
font sizes because of the detail of most characters (a normal Kanji can
be unreadable in anything smaller than size 12, not mentioning that
sometimes Flash likes to crop text even if there's still plenty of space
available). But it's still the best solution when it comes down to
proper localization.
Also, you can't rotate text made with _sans, or use a different opacity,
and scaling is not exactly smooth. In those cases, you'd need to draw
the text, capture the textfield into a BitmapData, and then use that
bitmap instead. It's not very practical in your case (because you're
outputting to Flash 7) but it's the only way to do such a thing.
However, if you *really* want to include fonts, using any real
professional font like the ones included in Windows (Arial, Tahoma, etc)
is a good choice. You can also use the original font (Univers or
whatever) for roman text and other like Arial for nonroman text.
I hope that helps.
Zeh
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