Special characters

[Sirius_Alpha]

Everyone is likely aware of Gǃkúnǁʼhòmdímà, a rather large TNO. We've been able to Latinize its name in Celestia using "G!kun||'homdima" or variants thereof. The recent announcement of new names for a batch of a hundred new extrasolar planets brings with it a similar set of challenges. For example, consider the case of WASP-17 -- a.k.a., "Dìwö."

Spoiler

Code: Select all

1019276787 "Dìwö:WASP-17:TOI-1050:TIC 66818296"
{
   RA 239.9625
   Dec -28.0616666666667
   Distance 1338.5701
   SpectralType "F3V"
   AppMag 11.59
   Radius 961181
   UniformRotation
   {
      Period 600
      Inclination 101.05
      AscendingNode 238.85
   }
   InfoURL "http://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/simbad/sim-basic?Ident=WASP-17"
}

In Celestia the first name is reduced to "D." Close enough I guess. The planet's name is assigned Ditsö̀ (the final character being an o with an umlaut + grave accent), which Celestia turns into just "Dits."

Of course we can continue to Latinze these, but has there been any thought into expanding the versatility of the text encoding in Celestia?

[SevenSpheres]

You can use this site to get the Unicode for the character, e.g. ì = U+00EC, and then escape it in the ssc file as, in this case, "\u00ec".

Gǃkúnǁʼhòmdímà would become "G\u01c3k\u00fan\u01c1\u02bch\u00f2md\u00edm\u00e0", but in this case there are problems; Celestia doesn't seem to support all of these characters, and the name appears as "G?kún??hòmdímà".

[onetwothree]

In 1.7 with truetype fonts this should be fixed.

[Janus]

A thought in addendum.

Can the greeking code be adjusted so that individuals can have international characters are adjusted to the current language if they like?
That way people can select whether to see them in greek code, or the current language.
I always want greeking turned off, but some people might like to see an international name rendered in the original, or their own.


Janus.

[onetwothree]

We are waiting for your patches

[Janus]

@onetwothree

If I had the to do knowledge linguistic stuff, I would simply make all characters into their phonetic equivalent.
I myself get lost anytime character codes go beyond 127.
The rest of it is basically gibberish to me, unrecognizable, unreadable.
When I set my language to english, I expect to never see anything non english.

All I want is the ability to turn off what is now hardcoded.
What you have done has made celestia harder for me to use personally.
While I know this is not the case for everyone, I find one size fits all solutions frustrating.

I will worry about that later however, my focus is on lua/celx at the moment.


Janus.