Support for the Esperanto alphabet

I’m wondering how many interpreters support the full Esperanto alphabet, including such exotic letters as Ĉĉ, Ĝĝ, Ĥĥ, Ĵĵ, Ŝŝ, and Ŭŭ. There are standards for writing Esperanto where these letters are not available, but I’d rather include them if possible. On my Ubuntu 9.10 system, neither the interpreter in Inform 7 nor Ubuntu’s official “gargoyle-free” package of Gargoyle can display these.

Edit: Perhaps I should note that I’m compiling to Z-code at the moment.

Edit 2: I’ve remembered the Unicode Interrogation extension for Inform 7 by Michael Martin, and am now using that to provide two different versions of any Esperanto text.

The catch with Unicode characters is that two conditions must be met for it to work:

  1. The interpreter needs to support Unicode, and
  2. The font that the interpreter is using (usually provided by the operating system) needs to include images for the characters.

Windows Frotz and Zoom (for OSX) have pretty decent Unicode support, so I’d expect both these to display the Esperanto characters if there is a font present that includes them. I know that Ben Cressey has recently merged the Unicode work I did to the Frotz core for Windows Frotz into Gargoyle, but I don’t believe that that work is available as yet, except from the Gargoyle source code repository.

There’s a Unicode.z5 test program bundled with Windows Frotz that prints all the Unicode characters it can, which may help: you can see if that prints out the characters you want. Alternatively, I can offer to test any Z-code file you’ve got under Windows Frotz.

Thanks for the offer to run tests (and the work on Frotz Unicode support). I ran some tests of my own on Windows Frotz (using the default fonts, I think) and it did everything I hoped it would - or at least, it did on Windows. :slight_smile: Wine doesn’t handle Windows Frotz very well.

I don’t know if this will help or not, but way back when, I was trying to translate one of my Speed-IF games into Esperanto. I don’t think I did a good job of it, but here’s where I left version 2 of it: plover.net/~davidw/fajfeta_v2.z5 , where I tried to offer the player the option of how s/he’d like the Esperanto characters to appear. Try as I might, changing the font in Windows Frotz failed to display the proper characters for me. Perhaps I was just doing it wrong, but I don’t know.

Mr. Welbourn:

Oddly enough, the Esperanto characters in my work-in-progress worked in Windows Frotz for me, while the Esperanto characters in your file didn’t. I suspect this is a character encoding issue I circumvented by using Inform 7.

In case you’re wondering, by the way, I’m just including a bit of Esperanto text in my story. I haven’t yet tried to write IF in Esperanto.

Peace,
Kazuki Mishima

Ah. I guess then we can safely assume that I made an error, not Windows Frotz. Good to know.

David, if you’ve still got the source feel free to put it on the web page and I’ll do my best to point out why it doesn’t work. Note that you’ll also most likely need at least Inform 6.30, as earlier versions had nasty bugs in its handling of non-Latin-1 alphabets.

If you get a font that can support Esperanto characters configured in Windows Gargoyle, it will properly display the characters. Finding a good font might be a trick, but the interpreter’s Unicode support is solid.