Wishlist: use a font that displays non-latin letters and allow writing unicode function names

uwe_a_a

Wishlist: use a font that displays non-latin letters and allow writing unicode function names

in Integration and Hardware • 1 month ago

Greetings,

I've recently started palying with processing as part of digital expression workshop for kids; its awfully magnificent ! but there are two issue related to the kids being non-english speaking and have hard time writing and reading english ; the first is using a font in the editor that renders readable arabic text (as the output looks perfect in arabic), I'm running linux (ubuntu 13.04) and changing the editor.font to monospace,plain,12 in preferences.txt works fine.

The other thing is writing function names and variables in arabic; if i understand correctly, processing uses java in the backend; and if i understand correctly, java can handle unicode function names and variable names. if processing can take care of this as well, it would be awfully great as it makes it easier for the kids to relate to terminology they create and are familiar with !

Cheers,

Replies(5)

PhiLho

Re: Wishlist: use a font that displays non-latin letters and allow writing unicode function names

1 month ago

If you mean writing your own function and variable names in Arabic, I suppose you can already do it, no?

Ah, no! I tried with a function name using a French accented letter, and the pre-processor fails on it...
Then I suggest to open a GitHub issue so that authors of Processing are aware of the problem. It might be trivial to fix... or very hard!

uwe_a_a

Re: Wishlist: use a font that displays non-latin letters and allow writing unicode function names

1 month ago

Thanks for directions, I've opened three issues related to language in github!

https://github.com/processing/processing/issues/2043
https://github.com/processing/processing/issues/2042
https://github.com/processing/processing/issues/2041

Cheers,

dimkir

Re: Wishlist: use a font that displays non-latin letters and allow writing unicode function names

1 month ago

Dear uwe_a_a,

I was interested in feasibility of using national (unicode) characters in java as variable names and did some investigation.

Indeed, it seems that Java supports unicode characters as variable names (I didn't manage to find any examples in Arabic, but I found example of java class written in Russian, which I managed to compile and run well with Java (but not Processing).

However the author of the original article has mentioned a bit problem for this "mixed-text" approach, namely: necessity to switch all the time between keyboard layouts, for example to type something like:

                  // setter for Age
                  public void setВозраст(int возраст) {
                                    Возраст = возраст;
                  }

And this keyboard-switching seems significantly reduce the speed of typing and raises questions of feasibility of this method.

Another concern, I have, is that Arabic seems to be Right-to-left language. So if mixing Latin letters with Russian letters already introduces a bit of havoc, what's gonna happen if you mix Left-to-right alphabet with Right-to-left alphabet?

Just for reference

I also found this example: (see code below) for Java, which I managed to compile in Netbeans (with UTF-8 as project's encoding). This kinda shows that you can even use Chinese as well. (Be careful if you try to copy/paste this into your PDE environment, most likely your font doesn't support some of those characters, and anyways it won't compile in PDE).

public class VeryInternational {
public static void main(String[] args) {
int Δ = 1;
double π = 3.141592;
String 你好 = "hello";
Δ++;
System.out.println(Δ);
}
}

dimkir

Re: Wishlist: use a font that displays non-latin letters and allow writing unicode function names

1 month ago

Another question I have is simplier:

In your message you state:

the first is using a font in the editor that renders readable arabic text (as the output looks perfect in arabic)

but in the title of your post you write:

wishlist: use a font that displays non-latin-letters

which to me seems a bit contradictory:

in your first statement you state that you successfully render readable arabic text, and in your wishlist you're asking to introduce a font which displays non-latin-letters (but you already see non-latin-letters, isn't it correct? so what's the problem?)

Sorry if I have misunderstood your message, but may you be able to clarify this confusion, I would be grateful.

regards,

Dimitry

p.s. I have previously answered few posts regarding support of arabic, japanese and chinese characters in Processing, and as to my experience, most of problems with font display are arising not from Processing, but from whether specific font is installed on your system.

https://forum.processing.org/topic/read-a-text-file-with-arab-characters

https://forum.processing.org/topic/japanese-characters-in-processing

uwe_a_a

Re: Wishlist: use a font that displays non-latin letters and allow writing unicode function names

1 month ago

Greetings,

Well, I was talking about the font used in the editor; that one does not render correctly! but the text rendered by the text() function looks good.

Regarding typing speed, yes, ofcourse it takes longer to to switch between english and arabic, but the kids recognize the letters of their native language better and faster, not to mention they understand what it means; understanding very little of what they write defeats the purpose of being exposed to programming logic and having fun with it, when the whole things is in english, there is not much to catch for their untrained eye for english language, when you have english snippets in the middle (an if here, a loop there) its ok.

now the RTL issue is ofcourse problematic, but we face this in every context you can think of ...but its not a problem when we are talking about quoted text. but the bidirectional rendering algorithms are not straight forward, i'm happy that the shape of letters is being handled correctly and the code would compiles/run !

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