Special Characters in Dialogue

[Dragonstar89]

I've been searching a lot and a lot on this, and re-read the documents but I'm not too sure what to do at this moment. Basically, as the title says, I want to know specifically how Ren'Py goes about to include 'special characters' in dialogue?

Things like the yen (¥) symbol, Euro (€), etc. Being a web developer at core, I know this sorta thing will usually depend on the charset such as UTF-8, Unicode, etc. But I'm clueless as to what Ren'Py uses, and what's the standard for writing out the special character in a string of dialogue.

Thanks in advance.

[Asceai]

Simply create scripts in UTF-8 and make sure you have a font that supports your special characters.

[i1abnrk]

Python and renpy both use UTF-8 as default. But that doesn't mean the text editor you use does. Look in the options of your text editor to see if you find and set the 'default encoding' to UTF-8. If not you can either use a different editor, you can use 'alt codes' where you hold alt and type the utf character number on the number pad, or you can use the 'character map' a utility program in Windows to copy and paste them to the editor.

[Asceai]

Python and renpy both use UTF-8 as default. But that doesn't mean the text editor you use does. Look in the options of your text editor to see if you find and set the 'default encoding' to UTF-8. If not you can either use a different editor, you can use 'alt codes' where you hold alt and type the utf character number on the number pad, or you can use the 'character map' a utility program in Windows to copy and paste them to the editor.

I don't think either of those will help if the editor doesn't support UTF-8, because it won't be creating UTF-8 files and probably won't even display those special characters. And if it does display them, they're probably in the system encoding (likely Latin-1) so characters other than the things you can type on a keyboard anyway won't be valid UTF-8 and will not look as you expect in ren'py.

There is one thing you can do, though, without a UTF-8 editor. Python (and therefore hopefully by extension Ren'Py, but I haven't tested this and don't know) lets you specify unicode codepoints through escape sequences using \u#### (for 16-bit codepoints) and \U######## (for 32-bit codepoints). The #### is a hex value in each case. To use this, first find the codepoint (in hex) of the unicode character you would like. Fileformat.info's unicode pages are good for this.
For example, Unicode Character 'SNOWMAN'. The hex value is in the URL, but it's also in the title, under 'UTF-16 (hex)' and everywhere else on that page- 2603. To use this, just put in \u2603. For example

Code: Select all

label start:
   eileen "A snowman for you! \u2603"

Voila, a snowman without needing a UTF-8-supporting editor.

Anyway, easiest way is to just get an editor that does support UTF-8. I'm a big Notepad2 fan myself.

[Dragonstar89]

Python and renpy both use UTF-8 as default. But that doesn't mean the text editor you use does. Look in the options of your text editor to see if you find and set the 'default encoding' to UTF-8. If not you can either use a different editor, you can use 'alt codes' where you hold alt and type the utf character number on the number pad, or you can use the 'character map' a utility program in Windows to copy and paste them to the editor.

I don't think either of those will help if the editor doesn't support UTF-8, because it won't be creating UTF-8 files and probably won't even display those special characters. And if it does display them, they're probably in the system encoding (likely Latin-1) so characters other than the things you can type on a keyboard anyway won't be valid UTF-8 and will not look as you expect in ren'py.

There is one thing you can do, though, without a UTF-8 editor. Python (and therefore hopefully by extension Ren'Py, but I haven't tested this and don't know) lets you specify unicode codepoints through escape sequences using \u#### (for 16-bit codepoints) and \U######## (for 32-bit codepoints). The #### is a hex value in each case. To use this, first find the codepoint (in hex) of the unicode character you would like. Fileformat.info's unicode pages are good for this.
For example, Unicode Character 'SNOWMAN'. The hex value is in the URL, but it's also in the title, under 'UTF-16 (hex)' and everywhere else on that page- 2603. To use this, just put in \u2603. For example

Code: Select all

label start:
   eileen "A snowman for you! \u2603"

Voila, a snowman without needing a UTF-8-supporting editor.

Anyway, easiest way is to just get an editor that does support UTF-8. I'm a big Notepad2 fan myself.

Thanks the:

Code: Select all

label start:
   eileen "A snowman for you! \u2603"

Is all I needed to know how to do I got it working now. Anyways, my editor is Notepad++ with UTF-8 without BOM encoding.