Hi,
Is there a way to display Greek characters in I7? Ancient Greek, with all its diacritics, is a plus. Would this depend on the interpreter being used?
Inform 7 supports Unicode (via the two built-in Unicode extensions by Graham Nelson). So its possible (see Ch. 5.11 of the Documentation). I suppose the end result does depend on whether the player has an appropriate Unicode font available and if they can make the interpreter use it.
And whether Unicode can properly encode ancient Greek. I know there’s been some wrangling about that.
For how to display Greek characters, see “The Über-complète clavier” example in the Inform 7 documentation.
A safer way, if it can be fitted into the game, might be to save the Greek text as a jpg or png file and display it as a figure in the game at the appropriate places.
You must be writing for a very highly educated (and very limited) reader base.
Robert Rothman
I think we have wider support for Unicode than for images, at the moment.
Safety would call for doing both.
If you can represent the text with normalised unicode (ie, all diacritics must be already combined and not represented as a separate character) then you might get lucky. Check out curiousdannii.github.com/if/tests/unicode.z5 and see how it goes in your favourite interpreter.
But it seems not every interpreter does font substitution. Gargoyle doesn’t 
. But web browsers do.
ΑΒΓΔΕΖΗΘΙΚΛΜΝΞΟΠΡΣΤΥΦΧΨΩΪΫάέήίΰαβγδεζηθικλμνξοπρςστυφχψωϊϋόύώϏϐϑϒϓϔϕϖϗϘϙϚϛϜϝϞϟϠϡϢϣϤϥϦϧϨϩϪϫϬϭϮϯϰϱϲϳϴϵ϶ϷϸϹϺϻϼϽϾϿ
Another thing to note is that you can’t rely on the interpreter telling you whether it can print a character. It will tell you it can even though the font doesn’t support it. If you see question marks in that unicode test then the interpreter thinks it can print the character.
Yeah, that was a Clever Idea of mine that turned out to not work in the real world. Sorry.
Well, I got Classical Greek to show up in Frotz. I just grabbed text from Little Sailingand copy pasta’d. Got all the breathing marks etc. This is actually good enough for me, but I didn’t text other interpreters.
I’ve never really understood unicode very well.
Audience? Oh, it’s just an idea to sprinkle some Greek here and there in something I was brainstorming. Although I would very much like to create a game which teaches the rudiments of Latin.
I’m reminded of some of Umberto Eco’s work. I read (and very much enjoyed) Foucault’s Pendulum in an English translation of the main body of the work. I suspect I would have enjoyed it even more if I had been able to understand the ten or so other laguages in which he intersperses pieces here and there. Alas, my own education was incomplete.
Robert Rothman
Possibly useful, possibly not, depending on where you’re getting your Greek text from, but for this kind of purpose I usually compose my Greek using this tool to get all the accents and breathing marks correct:
users.ox.ac.uk/~tayl0010/polyton … utter.html
…and then paste into Inform.
FYI, it works well with the default font in Gargoyle, too.