On Wed, 18 Oct 2006 10:27:02 -0400 Karl Anders wrote:


> .... and found it easier to make japanese characters with osaka.ttf (part of
> system 9) then to write umlauts with the PoV-Fonts. If Thorsten ever sees
> this he will probably tell me it's dead easy, but I wanted to put my little
> bit of spare time into the piggies and not into the writing.

Yes, of course.
 
> When I
> started using computers there were no umlauts at all (those were the
> days), so "Holzfaeller" does not look too strange to me :-)

It's not too strage for me, too, but it's not as nice as it can be.

There's a character set named 'unicode' as an extension to 'ascii'.
It contains a lot characters. Most symbols of known languages and of
some unknown as well are represented. Unfortunaltely 7 or 8 bits are not
enough to enumerate all those characters therefore some sort of multibyte
encoding is required. One of this is utf8. Within the first (last?) 7 bits
'utf8' is identical to 'ascii' so theres no need to change anything
('ascii' encoded text is also 'utf8' encoded). But additionaly it has the
capability to interpret 1, 2, 3 or 4 bytes as one character.

Most modern text editors support utf8 encoding they just have to be
told to use it (Actually my whole OS/Linux system uses utf8 as standard
encoding but thats an other story).

To use utf8 in PoV you just must add 'charset utf8' into the global
settings, like this

global_settings {
	charset utf8
}

and of course switch your editor to utf8-encoding.

This won't influence any 'ascii'-scenes but additionally you can use
umlauts, japanese and chinese characters and a lot other characters all at
once directly from within the text editor. 
Unfortunately some PoV-ttf-Fonts do not contain german umlaut characters,
so one has to chose another ttf-file for these.

Maybe this is of interest for you.

Regards,
Sebastian

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