How to use foreign letters?

Authoring TADS
1

I found the source of Cloak of Darkness and tried to edit that to get some idea of how to compile and write a game.

I tried changing the top line to read:

#charset “utf-8”

Then changed some room descriptions to include some foreign characters.

But when I compile and ran the game again, all of the foreign characters read as ???. I even tried running in Gargoyle, which advertises itself as supporting UTF-8, yet I only see ???. I don’t see how my terminal can be at fault, as the terminal can understand these characters perfectly fine.

What do I need to do to get this to work?

2

Gargoyle supports Unicode for Glulx and Z-Machine in the current release. The forthcoming version will add Unicode support for TADS.

In terms of how to use extended characters, it’s not enough to put the charset directive at the top (though you must do that as well). You actually have to save the file encoded as UTF-8. The details on how to do this vary by text editor.

3

The files are saved as UTF-8, my system seems to do that by default. How about using the standard TADS interpreter? Does that not support UTF-8?

4

QTads and the HTML TADS player both support UTF-8, so whichever one you are using ought to work.

Check the interpreter’s font setting and make sure it’s using a Unicode font that includes those glyphs. If it doesn’t, you will see the missing character symbol even if the glyph is coming through correctly.

You can also try this build of Gargoyle if you’re in the mood for a bit of beta testing.

5

Okay, I tried QTads on another computer, and the characters appear fine, so I guess it is t3run that doesn’t support Unicode. I’m quite confused why my console and terminal can use Unicode, but t3run doesn’t.