Suggestion: AmigaOS handling of foreign characters and bitmap fonts

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ancalimon
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Suggestion: AmigaOS handling of foreign characters and bitmap fonts

Post by ancalimon »

I don't know how other languages work..

But in order to display turkish non-English characters on amigaos, you need these things:

a turkish keymap + turkish modified fonts.

The modified fonts created by Turkish Amiga users traditionally have a "-iso9" at the end of the filename.

You have to clean some characters from the fonts and redraw a Turkish equivalent of that character to the cleaned character's place.

I have a suggestion.

What if we had a little updated setmap program that is called from startup-sequence that loads a small bitmap file that automatically assign them to keys? (and even adds a generic special characters bitmap fonts file that do not have a turkish (or other language) bitmap file?

this way, we would not need separate font files for all languages we want to use.

For example:

c:setmap en tr pl

would load the files generic-tr, generic-pl, helvetica-tr, helvetica-pl (and all other xxx-tr xxx-pl files available for all fonts) and appends them to fonts.

There could be a shortcut that would switch different keymaps and/or fonts.

Can this be done for all AmigaOS versions including 4.1 ?

There is also the problem with I and i letters with Turkish. In Turkish I and i letters are totally different letters. "I" is capital of "?", and "?" is capital of "i"

So a program called "Information" is actually different than a program called "information". There actually are two different keymaps for Turkish because of this in OS4.1 fe that I have. (something like I=? and I=i) I remember choosing one of the options and Had many problem after installation and later I choose the other option.

When creating a Turkish iso9 font, you do not change little "i" to "?" but make the modified letter for little "?" to little "?". As a result, the font prefs program from OS3.9 previews to fonts as this (will try OS4.1fe classic):

AaBbÇcDdEeFfGgĞğHhIiİiJjKkLlMmNnOoÖöPpRrSsŞşTtUuÜüVvYYyZz

Instead of this:

AaBbCcÇçDdEeFfGgĞğHhIıİiJjKkLlMmNnOoPpQqRrSsŞşTtUuÜüVvWwXxYyZz

How can this be fixed?
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nbache
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Re: Suggestion: AmigaOS handling of foreign characters and bitmap fonts

Post by nbache »

Can't go into the details at the moment (not at home), but it sounds like you are not aware of the big differences in how locale issues are handled in OS4.x compared with earlier versions.

For OS4, there are some documentation files in the Documentation drawer, among them one called Fonts (IIRC). That should explain how the issue you try to solve is (I believe) already solved in OS4, in a similar, but still different - and transparent - way.

Best regards,

Niels
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Re: Suggestion: AmigaOS handling of foreign characters and bitmap fonts

Post by Belxjander »

I didn't need any special tools for Japanese Fonts...

I only had to install a Unicode Extended Font of the "OpenType" format.

This lets me actively view a full Hiragana (~48 symbols) Katakana (~48 symbols) and most Kanji (13000+) as defined with Codepoints
in addition to Heiroglyphics and a whole range of character symbols in addition to English.

The only limitation is that the Applications I use need to have OS4.x Font usage awareness for more than the basic ISO-Latin1 0-256 Character range.

Other than that...I have run into a few problems with Unicode aware programs that don't work when the system locale *is* set to UTF-8,
specifically CinnamonWriter for one (crashes because the UTF-8 handling appears to be centered around being added to a non-UTF-8 locale setting).

so you may want to look again at what settings and font combination you actually use and see where there is mis-use of the characters concerned.

It may simply be missing configuration details within your already existing setup that you weren't aware of at first glance.

With Japanese it is seriously painful to sort out input at the moment (I'm still working on how to stack rules properly so that I can deal with Hiragana / Katakana / Kanji and English or other Symbols being entered within (currently) 4 sets of rules and still handing sequences to the OS properly).
ancalimon
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Re: Suggestion: AmigaOS handling of foreign characters and bitmap fonts

Post by ancalimon »

What about OS 3.x ?

I just had a look at my OS4.1 installation and font setting does not seem to have any bitmap fonts as far as I could tell.

How would bitmap fonts work if I install them inside fonts: ? Without a modified bitmap font, how would it know how to create the Turkish characters?
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nbache
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Re: Suggestion: AmigaOS handling of foreign characters and bitmap fonts

Post by nbache »

It's all explained in the Fonts file in the Documentation drawer, as I wrote above.

Best regards,

Niels
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