I am about to translate a game I'm writing to various languages.

ie. English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Korean and Chinese Simplified / Traditional.

I am using Glyph Designer to create the bitmap font sheets I need for my text rendering.

I need to create special font sheets for the various different languages. So I need to have a list of the glyphs for each language I am adding support for.

For example, my English font sheet uses: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz1234567890"!`?'.,;)[]{}<>|/@\^$-%+=#_&~*

Where can I find lists of these glyphs? Has someone already got them listed somewhere?

EDIT: Sorry can a mod please move this to a more appropriate forum.

This forum is fine. A unicode font is probably what you need; you can read up on the concept at wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode

The problem is I'm developing for iOS so there are memory contraints. I don't think it's feasible to have an entire Unicode font in memory at the sizes I need.

So I really would like to have separate texture sheets for each langauge. Also I will be using UTF-8 rather than a UNICODE format so I can maintain the use of std::string which I have without needing to change everything to std::wstring.

Here is what I have so far. I don't even have a clue if I'm on the right track to be honest.

List of Chinese Radicals (http://www.yellowbri...se/radicals.php)

??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

Korean Alphabet Chart (http://www.korean-ar...an alphabet.htm)

????????????????????????????????????????

Japanese Hiragana Syllables (Alphabet) (http://www.linguanau...se_alphabet.htm)

????????????????????????????????????????????????

There are just under 400,000 code points assigned to Han characters in Unicode. If you're developing for iOS, sticking a bitmap font containing all of that into memory is going to be worse than using a True Type Font. In comparison, the Arial Unicode MS font on my computer right now takes up 22.1 MB and the Sim Sun font, which is more or less dedicated to Asian code points, is about 13.1 MB. For more details you can consult Chapter 12 of the Unicode standard.

From what I know, Chinese is a tricky one. You need more than just the radicals. A word may combine a set of radicals, but not in a consistent way as you might assume. They can be combined side-by-side, above-and-below, inside-outside, or possibly others ways. Also when combined they may be squished or slightly redesigned to fit (or just because). That would be why Unicode allocates 400,000 symbols, to account for the combinations. You could not pay me enough to design a Chinese font set. I wonder if one could take an existing Chinese font and stylise it, e.g. programmatically change the width and taper of the strokes that make it up?

I'm assuming that you're pretty well versed in the linguistical culture of the language you're translating to? or maybe you're just translating commands and other simple things.

So I need to have a list of the glyphs for each language I am adding support for

Usually you generate this list by iterating through all of your translated documents, and collecting each unique glyph that appears. This way you only build bitmaps for the glyphs actually used, instead of all how-every-many-thousand of them.

Do you actually need all the chinese character-like-things, or would it be enough to just have the ones you need for translating the game? That is, do you need to allow the players to chat in chinese?