DIR7 Character Set Problem / Foreign Language

Question

Hi there,
I am working on an app built using Director 7 that until now
has used the standard English (latin-1) character set.
However, I am required to deliver a new version including
some elements displayed in a second language, in this case Welsh,
which uses characters outside of the normal set. I believe those
required are included in Latin-1 Extended, otherwise in Unicode as
a whole, obviously.
I am having specific problems with two characters that appear
to be missing from Latin-1, which are: ŵ and ŷ
(w-circumflex, and y-circumflex [i think!]).
In a standard text box I create using Director, I am unable
either to paste either character in, or enter it using its
ALT+combination, let alone save to the associated database.
I have read that Dir 11 is the first version with full
Unicode support - which surprises me - however I would assume that
someone would likely have hit this, or a similar issue before the
release of this version and was wondering if there is a possible
solution without upgrade.
My possible thinking is either a declaration that allows
change of a Charset, as I might do in XHTML for example, or
deployment of an Xtra that allows me to use a different character
set.
If anyone could shed some light on the matter, it would be
very helpful! Thanks in advance!
Rich.

Answer 1

Yes, this was always a problem for years. Back when I was
**** this, we had
some projects that needed text displayed in various
languages. Each
language presented its own challenges. Things like Greek
weren't too bad,
because the Symbol font works for most Greek text. (Only
problem was the
's' version of Sigma, which had to switch back to Times New
Roman.) Various
eastern European languages (Polish, Czech, Hungarian, etc.)
posed a problem
with some of the accents that were not available in standard
font sets. We
were forced to live without some of the more exotic accents,
but were told
that it would still be readable without them, if not exactly
correct. This
would probably be the closest to your situation, from what
little I know
about Welsh. It could be worse, though. Hebrew and Arabic
were challenging
as they are written right-to-left, and thus had to have code
written to
input them backwards. Russian was also tough, as the Cyrillic
alphabet has
more characters than the others, but I was able to find a
font to fake it.
(It replaced some of the lesser-used standard characters in
order to fill in
all the letters, which unfortunately meant that in the rare
cases where
those characters *were* needed, we had to improvise.) The
hardest by far
were any east Asian languages. In that case, I gave up on
trying to display
any of the text in text form, and just converted it all to
bitmaps. Without
Unicode, trying to display Mandarin or Japanese or Korean
correctly as text
is pretty much impossible.