What is the font used to display dialogue?

[GanonZD]

Why do we even use this font? It doesn't support many foreign characters, like æ.

[Enthalpy]

Because AA-authenticity is a bigger priority than ensuring that the font face is consistent between a and æ.

[GanonZD]

Try typing æ. It produces à. A completely unrelated character. "Consistent" is an interesting choice of word.

[kwando1313]

And this matters... Because...?

[E.D.Revolution]

æ ae vs œ and oe. Da hell is da difference?

[Enthalpy]

Let's drop the passive-aggression.

I thought by "support foreign characters," you meant "defaults to another font face," not "renders them as the wrong glyph entirely."

This is a problem, but I'm more inclined to try and add more characters to the current, very authentic font, than to abandon PW Extended entirely. Since this is the first I'm hearing of this problem, I can't imagine there's much demand for those characters. And as ED said, there's a workaround, even if it isn't technically correct. On the other hand, we'd see a much bigger reaction if we switched to another font entirely. Besides, an authentic font that does include those characters would be the best solution, and what we have now is the closest to that.

We've strayed considerably from the actual help topic, so I'll be splitting this.

EDIT: Split successfully!

[E.D.Revolution]

Well I agee. What is the demand for it? Do you want Vietnamese glyphs? Gaelic? Nordic? Old Latin? Not worth the effort, imo. Now the problem with æ rendering as à is a matter of correcting the mapping of the actual glyphs.

[GanonZD]

æ ae vs œ and oe. Da hell is da difference?

Da difference is that æ is on my keyboard, while œ might as well be a city in Upper Mongolia. Plus, to me, who has grown up with æ as part of the native alphabet, œ would seem completely out of place. I would get a headache if I were to read a book that used this substitution.

Well I agee. What is the demand for it? Do you want Vietnamese glyphs? Gaelic? Nordic? Old Latin? Not worth the effort, imo. Now the problem with æ rendering as à is a matter of correcting the mapping of the actual glyphs.

I don't think the actual glyph exists in PW Extended. And sorry to say it, I think there is a big difference between supporting the extended Latin alphabet and supporting Vietnamese characters. A side question: Do they even have AA in Vietnam?

EDIT: Split successfully!

Are you sure? I cannot find the old topic.

[Unas]

On the contrary, œ is pretty common in French while æ is basically only used in latin words.

In any case, it doesn't matter. The rule is :
- If the font supports this character, it should be rendered in AA style correctly
- If the font does not support this character, it should fall back to one of the browser's default font.

If that does not work as expected (the character is rendered as something else) then the TTF file for the font must be fixed.


For the record, I had worked quite a lot on this TTF at the time in order to correct the bad sizing of the original one that I found on CR.
The original one needed to be displayed at size 10px, to render characters that were actually the correct 12 pixels high... making the fallback to browser fonts a nightmare. (Because I had to set the display at 10px, but then character supported by the font would be rendered normally, and characters not supported by the font would be rendered terribly small).

Anyway, the font is on the bitbucket repository : someone feel free to fix it and commit it
For the record, at that time I used a software called TTFEdit ( http://ttfedit.sourceforge.net/ ) but it wasn't extremely user friendly nor stable. Some more recent software like Birdfont might be simpler to use.

[GanonZD]

On the contrary, œ is pretty common in French while æ is basically only used in latin words.

I hope you mean "basically only used in French for Latin loanwords." The æ character is extremely common in Scandinavian languages, mainly Danish and Norwegian. The speakers of those constitute about ten million Europeans. That corresponds to somewhere between one sixth and one seventh of the population in France. It's about the same as the urban population in Paris.

[Unas]

Of course that's what I was saying. I don't claim to know Danish better than you do...
I was just highlighting the fact that the usage of these specific characters is widely different across language : you care about æ a lot while French people don't, and you don't care about œ which is important in French.
Hence the need to have a proper fallback to all kinds of scripts when unsupported by the font, as described.