Print an 'el' - unicode 0190 in Inform 6?

I would like to use the ‘el’ character (Unicode 0190) in one of the games I am currently developing.

Is this possible?

Saw in another thread and DM4 page 260…

Zcharacter table + ‘@{be}’;

Note: this almost works but prints 3/4, I need the squiggly ‘E’

You need to convert the hex 0190 to decimal, which is 400.

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That will work. It isn’t exactly the symbol I would looking for but should do the job. ‘be’ was hex for 190 which on one table was the one I was looking for. But doesn’t appear to be available.

Thank you, Sir.

It’s likely you’re just seeing a different glyph for the same code point.

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I’m not quite sure what you mean by an “el”; U+0190 is the Latin capital epsilon, Ɛ, which is pretty rarely used but still available in a lot of fonts.

There’s an International Phonetic Alphabet symbol, ɛ (“epsilon”), to represent the vowel in “bet”, and some languages (like Lingála) use it in their writing system to indicate the “bet” vowel as opposed to the “bait” vowel, and for those languages there’s an uppercase version, in case it appears at the start of someone’s name or something. But most of the time ɛ is only used in phonetic transcriptions, and those don’t get capitalized.

(It’s specifically “Latin capital epsilon” because the uppercase version of the Greek letter epsilon is Ε which looks exactly like an E.)

Oh, I see what happened with the fraction—decimal 190 is hex 0xBE, which is ¾. But it sounds like you want hex 0x190, decimal 400, which is Ɛ. Unicode codepoints are usually given in hex, and Inform 7 is basically the only software in existence that expects them in decimal. Notably, Inform 6 still uses hex.

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I was under the impression it used decimal. At least in the case of

print (char) n

I had to use decimal when I was writing a little emoji Inform 7 extension. Is there a different Inform 6 function that uses hex?

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Oh, I see what you mean! Yes, in that case it does use decimal. I meant with the {@XX} syntax, for putting a Unicode character into the middle of a string.

Though you can also do print (char) $190 or the like if you want.

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This works perfectly. Everything else was an alternative. The ‘el’ or epsilon is one of the symbols used in the duo-decimal system. I am coding it into my EctoComp game.

Thanks to everyone for the help!

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Ahh, that makes sense! Glad it works!

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Wikipedia claims duodecimal often uses turned 2s and turned 3s for the extra digit. The turned digit 2 has code point U+218A and the turned digit 3 has code point U+218B, but these generally have no font support, so apparently the fallback is “Latin Capital Letter Open E”.

I need some symbols that would display in a z-code interpreter. It had to be something obvious and significantly different from regular symbols for the player to recognize that there is something that needed to be solved.

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According to the Dozenal Society — the premier global organization for the promotion of base 12 — the most popular letters for representing the numbers 10 and 11 are X and Ɛ and are called “dek” and “el,” respectively.

PS. These coding and writing exercises might help to keep my old brain functioning well. ??? And it’s fun. :wink:

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