I'm making a game I'd like to translate in multiple languages. It's in iOS, and I'm using Apple's NSString interface for holding all text displayed to the player in UNICODE encoding. So far, I'm using Arial for all of my text, but it's getting bland over time. I'd like to use some nicer fonts. Are there any good resources for UNICODE fonts?
My primary concern are languages that use totally different character sets such as Japanese, Chinese, Cyrillic, etc. My theory is that I'd end up having to find a language-specific font, then transpose the Japanese characters out of UNICODE values, and into the Japanese UTF-8 (maybe 16-bit?) format since that's what the Japanese font may be stored in... Not sure though.
If I wanted to translate my game into these language, does anyone have any advice on using font for these languages?
UNICODE Fonts
I recommend choosing a nice looking font that suits your game with good European language support (that means support for all the accented characters in the ANSI character set or extended ASCII set). Then use an entirely different font for your Japanse/Chinese/Cyrillic version.
The reason is that if you go out looking for a font that has good coverage for every language under the sun, you will restrict your font selection so much that you'll end up with something that's either Arial, or exactly as bland as Arial.
You may worry that the Japanese version ends up with a blander font, but I think that at the sort of font sizes you typically worry about in games, the priority for Japanese characters is readability over style anyway.
The reason is that if you go out looking for a font that has good coverage for every language under the sun, you will restrict your font selection so much that you'll end up with something that's either Arial, or exactly as bland as Arial.
You may worry that the Japanese version ends up with a blander font, but I think that at the sort of font sizes you typically worry about in games, the priority for Japanese characters is readability over style anyway.
Author
I like your thinking there, and there are a lot fonts out there that include all the accented letters in them, so I'll go that route. I'll put support for the more exotic fonts on hold for now.
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