FreeGameDev

Hi,

We are free software community members in Taiwan. We are now translating some games into traditional Chinese.

However, while translating, I keep wondering how our Chinese characters can show in supertuxkart. So I tested with our current translations.

I put the supertuxkart.mo into /data/po/zh_TW/LC_MESSAGES. And, as I expected, all I could see was a lot of question marks. I attached my snapshot in this post.

Any idea to help us with this problem?


Thanks,
Franklin

Hi Franklin,

I see you're using STK 0.6 (I believe).
SuperTuxKart 0.6 did not have very good support for foreign characters.
SuperTuxKart 0.7 is much better in this regard, and as you can see on our translation page, we now have a simplified chinese translation : https://translations.launchpad.net/stk

Now, you mention traditional chinese; I believe we currently do not have a traditional chinese font, only a simplified chinese font. Adding support for traditional chinese would be possible, however the first thing we need would be a font itself; do you know a good free (open) traditional font we could use?
Also, given the large size of traditional chinese, it would be expected that we won't ship this font by default but in an add-on package, to keep the download size not too big

Auria {l Wrote}:Hi Franklin,

I see you're using STK 0.6 (I believe).
SuperTuxKart 0.6 did not have very good support for foreign characters.
SuperTuxKart 0.7 is much better in this regard, and as you can see on our translation page, we not have a simplified chinese translation : https://translations.launchpad.net/stk

Now, you mention traditional chinese; I believe we currently do not have a traditional chinese font, only a simplified chinese font. Adding support for traditional chinese would be possible, however the first thing we need would be a font itself; do you know a good free (open) traditional font we could use?
Also, given the large size of traditional chinese, it would be expected that we won't ship this font by default but in an add-on package, to keep the download size not too big

Thanks for your quick reply.

What kind of font you need? Is a true type (unicode) font that we used for our system okay? And, how can we test with that first?

Also, did you mean that we don't need to translate for 0.6 packages and should translate 0.7 instead?


Thanks,
Franklin

Hi,

I guess about any font will do. We will need to export it to the irrLicht format; their font tool supports TTF only I _think_ (not sure) but anyway we can convert fonts with fontforge between formats as needed

And yes, you should translate for 0.7 and not 0.6, 0.6 will not have further releases so any translation made for 0.6 is basically wasted

Thanks.

I followed the instruction on sourceforge to try to checkout the stk source code from svn, but failed with this message:

$ svn co https://supertuxkart.svn.sourceforge.ne ... upertuxart supertuxkart
svn: Could not open the requested SVN filesystem

Please have a look at it. Later (or tomorrow) I'll send a traditional Chinese font to you. How should I send it to you? And how can we test for that first? Any hint or instruction?


Thanks,
Franklin

Hi !
It is a wrong URL; try this:

{l Code}: {l Select All Code}

svn co https://supertuxkart.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/supertuxkart/main/trunk/

You can simply upload it here. Make sure to check licensing issues, however, we need to know under which license is released (and also most licenses require us to know who made the font).
Currently there is no easy way for you to test the font in-game, since it needs to be converted by the irrlicht font tool and then adapted for the STK font system

I could do the conversion. BTW, what size is the ideal solution? I don't remember what size I chose for the two fonts I converted before. If I choose a somewhat small size, the file sizes will be lowered, but it can't be too small either.

Hmm, thinking about it, I might have used 32 or something... but don't quote me on that.

Auria {l Wrote}:You can simply upload it here. Make sure to check licensing issues, however, we need to know under which license is released (and also most licenses require us to know who made the font).
Currently there is no easy way for you to test the font in-game, since it needs to be converted by the irrlicht font tool and then adapted for the STK font system

We are currently discussing and deciding which font to use. May be a CC (Creative Commons) license font released by our Ministry of Education. After we decide I'll put it here.

Thanks for your help.


Franklin

oops, I just tried to upload the font. It seemed failed? I don't know what happened.

Anyway, this font is 13MB. If you didn't see the font file here, please download it at:

http://www.edu.tw/files/site_content/MA ... kai-pc.ttf

This font file is released by the Ministry of Education, ROC, and is licensed in Creative Commons.
We've asked an authority about CC in Taiwan and we're sure that if you just convert this font into another font format, it will NOT violate the CC license.

If you need to mark up the font source, please use "The Ministry of Education, ROC".

Any problem please tell me.


Thanks.

Oh, the link in my last reply directly downloads the font file. And the download page is at

http://www.edu.tw/mandr/content.aspx?si ... nt_sn=3591

On this page it says that this font is licensed in CC. If you can read Chinese feel free to read it.

And here is the zh_TW.po for supertuxkart 0.7. We haven't finished the translation (now about 60%), but you can test the font with it.
(Will you give us permission to commit our translation via svn? I have a sourceforge account. If not, please commit this file first. I'll post a new one once our work is done.)


Thanks.

Franklin {l Wrote}:If you need to mark up the font source, please use "The Ministry of Education, ROC".

Any problem please tell me.

Thanks.

Sorry, I fix my comment here. If this font can be accepted, in your add-ons please specify the source of this font as "The Ministry of Education, ROC".

Hi,

thanks. This font is CC-NoDerivate, however, which is quite borderline license (the NoDerivate clause would often be considered as non open). I'm not sure if we'd be allowed to uplaod such a font to sourceforge (since they only allow open stuff). Also Linux distributions would likely refuse to package it.

So I guess it could be provided as a separate add-on downloadable from a third-party site, unless we can find a better licensed font for open source

If you are not sure about the legality of previous font, please download this one instead:
ftp://cle.linux.org.tw/pub/fonts/cwttf/ ... /cwkai.ttf

It is a GPL font. The COPYING file is at its parent directory:
ftp://cle.linux.org.tw/pub/fonts/cwttf/

You can also read its readme file:
ftp://cle.linux.org.tw/pub/fonts/cwttf/Readme-en.cwttf


Thanks.

I believe we currently do not have a traditional chinese font, only a simplified chinese font.

Maybe we already have font for Traditional Chinese, because font which have Simplified Chinese character usually have Traditional Chinese character Maybe we should check the existing Simplified Chinese font before choose a new one ...

Franklin {l Wrote}:Hi,

We are free software community members in Taiwan. We are now translating some games into traditional Chinese. ...

Hi,

I'm the translator of current Simplified Chinese translation now about 80% is translated, the rest I'm not sure how to translate them well May I have a look on your translation?

You can download a quite old Simplified Chinese translation at viewtopic.php?f=18&t=83&start=50

Feel free to look at our translation. Our translation file was attached in the previous posts.

It's about 60% now, and we are still working on that.

It looks like current AR_PL_SungtiL_GB***.png didn't include Traditional Chinese characters ... but maybe included in AR_PL_Sungti font, just unexported ...

acme_pjz {l Wrote}:It looks like current AR_PL_SungtiL_GB***.png didn't include Traditional Chinese characters ... but maybe included in AR_PL_Sungti font, just unexported ...

I'm sure that cwttf font includes Simplified Chinese characters, as well as Japanese and Korean characters. See if the maintainers want to use this one for all the CJK fonts. Of course it's up to you to keep your own font. It's just a suggestion.

Thanks, that font seems fine

Could someone with the irrlicht font tool on windows convert it?

On a side note, traditional chinese is quite big. I somewhat wonder if the generated font textures may be huge and a possible problem for video cards. Guess we'll need to see

acme_pjz {l Wrote}:I'm the translator of current Simplified Chinese translation now about 80% is translated, the rest I'm not sure how to translate them well

Hmm, launchpad says 99% translated maybe someone else worked on it?

Auria {l Wrote}:Hmm, launchpad says 99% translated maybe someone else worked on it?

There are another people Xhacker Liu translated the other part I'll check out ... and I have another 85% translated version(below). Can we upload both Simplified Chinese translations for reference and refinement?

On Launchpad, you can have only one translation by language :/

Sorry for lack of activity; I'd appreciate is someone could convert the file using irrlicht's font tool?