International characters display - How?

[Larenon]

Hi everyone,

Hope I'm posting this in the right place. Anyway, here goes nothing: I'm in the beginning steps of developing an addon that would display texts in hungarian language. Now, hungarian is a very baaad language when it comes to texts in a programming point of view, because we have all those special characters where you have punctuations above various letters like dots, slashes and whatnot. Anyway I was wondering how can you display these special characters in a frame? What font to use or what magic one should work in the lua or xml to make these characters appear? I know somehow you can do it because when I write hungarian characters into the chat windows, they show without problems. Sometimes I've seen russian characters in chat windows also. So anyway I think you get my point, and hopefully someone could answer me.

My other question is that is it in any way illegal to display the quest descriptions in another language? You see, my addon is basically about having a database (in a simple lua file, containing a table) with the translated descriptions of quests. Now, when a hungarian guy comes to WOW and doesn't know English quite well, my idea would be that my mod would parse his questlog and display the translated versions of the quests he has and also for some quests there would be hints on how to complete them, etc. The actual questlog and quest interface would not be touched in any way of course, I would do the display of the translated quest text in my own separate frames, so its not like overwriting Blizzard's quest texts or something. So is this in any way illegal to do?

Hope you can help me and thanks for reading this far. :-)

[Karrion]

Originally Posted by Larenon Anyway I was wondering how can you display these special characters in a frame? What font to use or what magic one should work in the lua or xml to make these characters appear?

The easy way to do this is to make sure you edit the files in a text editor that understands UTF-8 file encoding. Then you just type the accented characters in directly.

Originally Posted by Larenon My other question is that is it in any way illegal to display the quest descriptions in another language? You see, my addon is basically about having a database (in a simple lua file, containing a table) with the translated descriptions of quests. Now, when a hungarian guy comes to WOW and doesn't know English quite well, my idea would be that my mod would parse his questlog and display the translated versions of the quests he has and also for some quests there would be hints on how to complete them, etc. The actual questlog and quest interface would not be touched in any way of course, I would do the display of the translated quest text in my own separate frames, so its not like overwriting Blizzard's quest texts or something. So is this in any way illegal to do?

I don't think there would be anything illegal about that, but you would have to manually translate the text descriptions of some thousands of quests, and include the translations in the addon, which sounds like a lot of work and a lot of memory usage...

[Larenon]

Originally Posted by Karrion The easy way to do this is to make sure you edit the files in a text editor that understands UTF-8 file encoding. Then you just type the accented characters in directly.

Thanks for the answer, I dug around in the bowels of wowwiki and I've also found that's the solution, so judging by your answer it seems I got it right. :-) The text display now works like a charm btw, I only have to save the "database" lua file in UTF-8 encoding. For people finding this topic in the future like 2 years from now, I'm now pasting the wowwiki link here as a community service completely free of charge. Yep, I'm such a nice guy. :-)

WowWiki: Accents, Special Chars and Umlauts

Originally Posted by Karrion I don't think there would be anything illegal about that, but you would have to manually translate the text descriptions of some thousands of quests, and include the translations in the addon, which sounds like a lot of work and a lot of memory usage...

Yep, that's something I'm worried about and that would have been my next question. :-) At this moment I'm having a separate lua file with just table entries in it with the translations. But if it grows really big it would be a tremendous memory waste. As far as I understand if I have the "database" lua file referenced in the xml then all of it is loaded into memory when the addon loads, am I right? So is there some way to somehow dynamically access the data and only load the necessary quest details on the spot when it is needed? Like some fancy savedvariables thing or some other magic?

As for the translations I'm sort of planning to make this some kind of a community project, so that I don't personally have to do all the translation work. If there will be a lot of translators signing up for the job, good; if there is no interest whatsoever, I still learned how to code scrolling frames in WOW. ;-)