On Mon, 18 Jan 1999 12:52:27 -0600, Thorsten Froehlich 
	<fro### [at] charliecnsiitedu> wrote:
>In article <36A34630.E37F86FA@panama.phoenix.net> , Anthony Bennett
><ben### [at] panamaphoenixnet>  wrote:
>>I don't
>>even know how to get the superpatch to output these characters. I don't
>>even know if I'm using a double byte font. I'm trying to do it with
>>MingLiU, which popped up after I installed the traditional chinese
>>multilanguage add-on for Explorer. Help me. Somebody. I've tried to find
>
>Currently POV-Ray does not support two byte characters (Unicode) at all. Only ASCII
>codes (0 to 127) work for most fonts.

That's why he mentioned the Superpatch :)  It does include Kochin 
Chang's patches for DBCS fonts, and an attempt at handling Unicode 
characters, but to tell the truth I've never been able to get the 
Unicode stuff to work, and I don't have ready access to a DBCS 
font for testing.  I'll look into this a little harder and post 
my findings here, unless somebody beats me to it.

Post a reply to this message

Ron Parker wrote:

> On Mon, 18 Jan 1999 12:52:27 -0600, Thorsten Froehlich
>         <fro### [at] charliecnsiitedu> wrote:
> >In article <36A34630.E37F86FA@panama.phoenix.net> , Anthony Bennett
> ><ben### [at] panamaphoenixnet>  wrote:
> >>I don't
> >>even know how to get the superpatch to output these characters. I don't
> >>even know if I'm using a double byte font. I'm trying to do it with
> >>MingLiU, which popped up after I installed the traditional chinese
> >>multilanguage add-on for Explorer. Help me. Somebody. I've tried to find
> >
> >Currently POV-Ray does not support two byte characters (Unicode) at all. Only ASCII
> >codes (0 to 127) work for most fonts.
>
> That's why he mentioned the Superpatch :)  It does include Kochin
> Chang's patches for DBCS fonts, and an attempt at handling Unicode
> characters, but to tell the truth I've never been able to get the
> Unicode stuff to work, and I don't have ready access to a DBCS
> font for testing.  I'll look into this a little harder and post
> my findings here, unless somebody beats me to it.

Well, if you have Windows 95 or NT and HTTP, then you do have ready access. If you go
to
http://www.microsoft.com/ie/ and get to the downloads for IE 3, the extras have
'Multilanguage support' down there somewhere. They are simply sets of standard MS
Windows NLS files and fonts bundled up. Pan-European, Korean, Chinese & Japanese.
These
are really more of Windows suppliments than just IE components.

Also, for personal use/evaluation, you can get a Unicode font from Bitstream
(Bitstream
Cyberbit).

Post a reply to this message

Ron Parker wrote:

> On Mon, 18 Jan 1999 12:52:27 -0600, Thorsten Froehlich
>         <fro### [at] charliecnsiitedu> wrote:
> >In article <36A34630.E37F86FA@panama.phoenix.net> , Anthony Bennett
> ><ben### [at] panamaphoenixnet>  wrote:
> >>I don't
> >>even know how to get the superpatch to output these characters. I don't
> >>even know if I'm using a double byte font. I'm trying to do it with
> >>MingLiU, which popped up after I installed the traditional chinese
> >>multilanguage add-on for Explorer. Help me. Somebody. I've tried to find
> >
> >Currently POV-Ray does not support two byte characters (Unicode) at all. Only ASCII
> >codes (0 to 127) work for most fonts.
>
> That's why he mentioned the Superpatch :)  It does include Kochin
> Chang's patches for DBCS fonts, and an attempt at handling Unicode
> characters, but to tell the truth I've never been able to get the
> Unicode stuff to work, and I don't have ready access to a DBCS
> font for testing.  I'll look into this a little harder and post
> my findings here, unless somebody beats me to it.

Well, if you have Windows 95 or NT and HTTP, then you do have ready
access. If you go to
http://www.microsoft.com/ie/ and get to the downloads for IE 3, the
extras have
'Multilanguage support' down there somewhere. They are simply sets of
standard MS
Windows NLS files and fonts bundled up. Pan-European, Korean, Chinese &
Japanese. These
are really more of Windows suppliments than just IE components.

Also, for personal use/evaluation, you can get a Unicode font from
Bitstream (Bitstream
Cyberbit).

Post a reply to this message

Hello.
Hope these would help.












Kieu

Anthony Bennett wrote:

> I am rendering a chinese chess set for a presentation and I need a list
> of the character codes for the symbols. In my experiments I've had
> trouble like
> the guy in the previous message. I don't know a word of chinese,
> I don't own a chinese computer or anything, but I HAVE GOT TO GET THIS
> THING DONE. Please, whoever can help, I implore you... Help me. I don't
> even know how to get the superpatch to output these characters. I don't
> even know if I'm using a double byte font. I'm trying to do it with
> MingLiU, which popped up after I installed the traditional chinese
> multilanguage add-on for Explorer. Help me. Somebody. I've tried to find
>
> information all day. I'm really tired. Help me.

Post a reply to this message

For us poor folks who can't read Chinese...
http://charts.unicode.org/unihan.html is quite handy.

I'm guessing that the codes you posted were in Big5.













Kieu wrote:

> Hello.
> Hope these would help.











>
> Kieu
>
> Anthony Bennett wrote:
>
> > I am rendering a chinese chess set for a presentation and I need a list
> > of the character codes for the symbols. In my experiments I've had
> > trouble like
> > the guy in the previous message. I don't know a word of chinese,
> > I don't own a chinese computer or anything, but I HAVE GOT TO GET THIS
> > THING DONE. Please, whoever can help, I implore you... Help me. I don't
> > even know how to get the superpatch to output these characters. I don't
> > even know if I'm using a double byte font. I'm trying to do it with
> > MingLiU, which popped up after I installed the traditional chinese
> > multilanguage add-on for Explorer. Help me. Somebody. I've tried to find
> >
> > information all day. I'm really tired. Help me.

Post a reply to this message

On Tue, 19 Jan 1999 10:40:18 -0800, Jon A. Cruz <jon### [at] geocitiescom> wrote:
>For us poor folks who can't read Chinese...
>http://charts.unicode.org/unihan.html is quite handy.

Indeed it is.  With the assistance of the charts there, plus the 
character map utility that comes with NT, plus the nice Unicode 
fonts that come with NT, I've determined that Unicode support in 
the Superpatch is none too great.  I need to recompile with some 
debugging and see just what it's doing, but it seems as though it 
is unable to find the characters I tell it to as double-byte 
characters, so it tries to use single-byte ones instead.  For 
example, 0x05D0 is the Hebrew character Aleph, but when I try to 
use it it seems to find character 0xF005 (a squiggly comma-like 
thing in user space) and "Latin Capital Letter Eth", a D with a 
line through it, which is at location 0xD0.  I don't know what 
this does with DBCS fonts - it may actually work - but it sure 
doesn't work with these Unicode fonts.  (0xF005 is what it tries 
automatically if it fails to find 0x05) When I know more, I'll 
post it here.

Post a reply to this message

On Mon, 18 Jan 1999 09:33:20 -0500, Anthony Bennett
<ben### [at] panamaphoenixnet> wrote:

>I am rendering a chinese chess set for a presentation and I need a list
>of the character codes for the symbols. In my experiments I've had
>trouble like
>the guy in the previous message. I don't know a word of chinese,
>I don't own a chinese computer or anything, but I HAVE GOT TO GET THIS
>THING DONE. Please, whoever can help, I implore you... Help me. I don't
>even know how to get the superpatch to output these characters. I don't
>even know if I'm using a double byte font. I'm trying to do it with
>MingLiU, which popped up after I installed the traditional chinese
>multilanguage add-on for Explorer. Help me. Somebody. I've tried to find

Okay, I found the problem, but I'm not sure how to deal with it.  The
thing is, it tries to convert whatever DBCS characters you give it to 
Unicode using the Japanese locale (this is hard-coded!).  As a result,
trying to use pure Unicode values does not work.  In fact, I can't
even get any Japanese values to work, either, but that may be because
I don't have the proper codepages installed.  In any event, I'm
considering just nuking the locale support and requiring Unicode.  Is
there any objection to this?

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"Ronald L. Parker" wrote:

> On Mon, 18 Jan 1999 09:33:20 -0500, Anthony Bennett
> <ben### [at] panamaphoenixnet> wrote:
>
> >I am rendering a chinese chess set for a presentation and I need a list
> >of the character codes for the symbols. In my experiments I've had
> >trouble like
> >the guy in the previous message. I don't know a word of chinese,
> >I don't own a chinese computer or anything, but I HAVE GOT TO GET THIS
> >THING DONE. Please, whoever can help, I implore you... Help me. I don't
> >even know how to get the superpatch to output these characters. I don't
> >even know if I'm using a double byte font. I'm trying to do it with
> >MingLiU, which popped up after I installed the traditional chinese
> >multilanguage add-on for Explorer. Help me. Somebody. I've tried to find
>
> Okay, I found the problem, but I'm not sure how to deal with it.  The
> thing is, it tries to convert whatever DBCS characters you give it to
> Unicode using the Japanese locale (this is hard-coded!).  As a result,
> trying to use pure Unicode values does not work.  In fact, I can't
> even get any Japanese values to work, either, but that may be because
> I don't have the proper codepages installed.  In any event, I'm
> considering just nuking the locale support and requiring Unicode.  Is
> there any objection to this?

My suggestion is to go ahead and drop MBCS and switch to UTF-8 for Unicode.
That allows specifying Unicode chars, but ASCII chars 0-0x7f stay the same.

That way any standard POV files will work untouched, and only files edited
for a MBCS patched version would need converting. That can also eleminate a
need for a flag to signal Unicode mode.

Post a reply to this message

On Sat, 23 Jan 1999 01:15:08 -0800, Jon A. Cruz <jon### [at] geocitiescom> wrote:
>"Ronald L. Parker" wrote:
>My suggestion is to go ahead and drop MBCS and switch to UTF-8 for Unicode.
>That allows specifying Unicode chars, but ASCII chars 0-0x7f stay the same.
>
>That way any standard POV files will work untouched, and only files edited
>for a MBCS patched version would need converting. That can also eleminate a
>need for a flag to signal Unicode mode.

For the record, I really like this idea and will probably switch to 
UTF-8 in the next Superpatch (whenever THAT is...)  I might also add 
a switch to allow you to use plain ol' UCS-2, just to make it easier 
to do a character or two from a Unicode font using the NT Character 
Map application or the charts at unicode.org.  

There'll be a problem for those of you who regularly use the 8-bit 
characters in ISO Latin-1, though.  If anyone who regularly uses 
8-bit characters has an idea how this can be implemented such that 
it's backward-compatible with the official version of POV, please 
speak up.  I think I can detect that a given string of characters 
is not valid UTF-8 and fall back to the 8-bit CMAP table, but 
this doesn't work in 100% of cases.  Some perfectly valid but 
unlikely strings of 8-bit characters could map to weird glyphs.

You would need three high-bit characters in a row, the first one 
has to be one of the sixteen characters that has a high nybble of 

high nybble of $8 through $B. (mostly symbols of one form or 
another, unlikely to be inside or at the end of a word, particularly
in combination, though there are conceivable exceptions.)  Some of 
the combinations thus formed might even be valid in the font you're 
using (particularly if you're using a Unicode font on NT, most of 
which include Arabic and Hebrew script.)

Post a reply to this message

On 25 Jan 1999 10:13:26 -0500, Ron Parker <par### [at] my-dejanewscom> wrote:
>You would need three high-bit characters in a row, the first one 
>has to be one of the sixteen characters that has a high nybble of 

>high nybble of $8 through $B. (mostly symbols of one form or 
>another, unlikely to be inside or at the end of a word, particularly
>in combination, though there are conceivable exceptions.)  Some of 
>the combinations thus formed might even be valid in the font you're 
>using (particularly if you're using a Unicode font on NT, most of 
>which include Arabic and Hebrew script.)

Erg.  It's worse than I thought.  You can also have sequences of
two high-bit characters, where the first has a high nybble of
0xC or 0xD and the second has a high nybble of 0x8 through 0xB.
These combinations encode characters in the range 0x80 through
0x7ff, which includes the entire set of high-bit characters.  
So if you use a character from the range 0xC0 through 0xC3 


trademarks of e.g. Spanish words!), you're guaranteed to have a 
valid UTF-8 representation for a character that's probably 
represented in your font.  

Maybe I need to add a "charset" keyword with allowed values of 
US-ASCII, ISO-8859-1, UTF-8, and ISO-10646-UCS-2 with a default 
of ISO-8859-1.  (All of these are IANA names for the various
charsets, so don't blame me for the huge name UCS-2 has. :) )

Any thoughts? Anyone? Does anyone but me and Jon care anymore?

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