Chinese localization

Forum|Forum|19 years ago
January 26, 2007
7 replies
852 views

Hi

I've been charged with internationalizing a Flash RIA, and unluckily for me one of the locales is China. Having spent fruitless hours trying to get just one Chinese character to display, my only chances of an ongoing career in IT are 1) resign and 2) beg for some help on here :-)

Text mainly comes from XML, but also from text files. There is text in button labels, in html fields, in datagrids, in scrolling displays. There are both input fields and static fields. The input fields also sometimes have exclude characters. These are all issues I anticipate, but so far I can't even get one measly character to show up.

Here's what I'm doing:-

XML file starts with:-
<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>
and is saved as utf-8.
I've replaced a Latin string in the working English version with a '是' character (may not display on this webpage, I copied and pasted from a Chinese website).
I've imported the MingLiU font and embedded it in the swf.
I've set the universal fontFamily (affecting all fields) for the app to MingLiU.

All I see is nothing.

I've searched the internet and this question comes up occasionally, the advise is normally pretty simple, and Ive tried everything.

Grateful for any ideass/pointers

ActionScript

This topic has been closed for replies.

G

Grime-PAuthor

Known Participant

Wow... don't embed font... IT WORKS!

That's great, thanks again. And on Windows / IE, if you don't have SImplified Chinese installed you are directed to install it. I will have to test for Apple / Mozilla users too (our test Mac is showing chinese characters fine, though I'm not sure if someone installed Chinese previously...)

Well, that is a very simple solution, and doesn't even require a recompile, I can do it all through XML. It'll take a while to prove whetehr this is a workable solution for me, but hopefully it is.

If not, I'll post back in this thread...

cheers

G

ggshow

Participating Frequently

welc

me

I would like to suggest you manually create a dynamic text on your stage (or may be outsite stage area), with MingLiU font, & all glyphs embeded, that will actually increase your swf file size up to 10MB, but not only 50-60K.

But since you want your flash application to be written purely in actionscript (40,000 lines?! I havent reach that level), forget about the suggestion mentioned above :-)

Actually I am having the same problem to embed dual bytes encoding font in flash. Normally for chinese font, I wont embed it. I believe MingLiU (Ming Light Unicode) font has now became a quite general Chinese Traditional font for windows user, which most pc with supported chinese fonts will have it.

If you found any better solution, remember to let us know.

G

Grime-PAuthor

Known Participant

ggshow, thanks very much for your input. Yes, that's great, the characters display, although the font isn't embedded so a user without MingLiU will get incorrect characters, am I right?

One of my tasks this morning was to start with a very simple Flash movie and see if I could slowly add features on the text side until it is of a similar complexity to our app, so you've saved me some time there, thanks again.

G

ggshow

Participating Frequently

Hi Grime-P,

check the file below, & let me know if you can see the chinese characters.

http://www.ggshow.net/files/ch.zip

G

Grime-PAuthor

Known Participant

Thanks for the replies people, though I don't think that's it.

There are no hand-drawn anythings on the stage, our app is written purely in actionscript, about 40,000 lines of it. Luckily its well architected, but even so its can be a major brain ache to work on.

I've imported and switched to other fonts, eg from Arial to TImes to Verdana, etc, without a hitch. Its just the Chinese font thats giving the pain.

I don't want to rely on the user's system fonts either (Ive seen advice to go with _serif or _sans), and after setting the default Win XP language for all programs to Chinese in the windows settings dialogue, browsing a webpage with chinese characters causes both IE and Firefox to crash, So embedding the font is the only answer. MingLiU only bumped the size up 50-60K or so.

rayden chan, I think if you want to use italic or bold characters you have to import the font seperately with bold or italic selected, or failing that import bold/itlaic versions of the font.

well, guess I'll keep trying.. Adobe could definitely give more advice on this one - businesses may choose to go with AJAX / DHTML for RIAs as China continues to grow as an important market.

R

rayden_chan

Participating Frequently

hello
I believe i know what's ur problem is...
if all steps are done and without any good, try check whether u have set the fonr type textfield ( or dynamic text) that u are working with, to either bold or italic?

coz i noticed there's a bug there where even if u have embeded the text font, the type sometimes didnt get to embedded.

any how, for further reference, you can refer to this link:
http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/webforums/forum/messageview.cfm?forumid=15&catid=194&threadid=1222000&highlight_key=y&keyword1=utf%2D8

D

dalewb

Inspiring

If the font is correctly installed on your computer AND if you've correctly embedded it into the text field you are using it should show up. When you say "...and embedded it in the swf" is it safe to assume you are using a dynamic text field hand drawn on the stage by you (as in, not instantiated through Actionscript at runtime) AND that once you've selected your Asian font for this dynamic text box that you then went and clicked on the "Embed" button on the right side of the properties palette and chose the characters you wanted to embed?

This is the only way I know of to get a font to show up in a swf without fail every time. All other methods may/may not work. Once you do this, you shouldn't need the font file to play the swf anymore - of course your fla and swf filesizes will go up so you might want to embed the font in a shared library instead.

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