Sturm Und Drang IF: A Stormy Romance

Inform 6 vs. UNICODE: Nobody Wins

January 1, 2010 at 5:31 pm (progress report) (character set, greek, Mac, OS 9, unicode)

As is often the case, I got in my head what seemed to be a fantastic idea: Zegrothenus deals with magic, so wouldn’t it be cool if I could use alchemical symbols in the game? Hey, INFORM supports Greek, doesn’t it? This is cake!

Altogether now — NOT.

After hours and hours of scouring the newsgroups, downloading various interpreters, fiddling with fonts, and hacking INFORM to no end, I have discovered several various truths that no-one has ever dared state in public.

• Inform 6 on Mac OS 9 absolutely ignores the -Cn switch. The same 8859 character set (or whatever, I’m too frustrated to care) is loaded regardless.
• No interpreter for Mac OS 9 supports UNICODE. That’s right. Freakin’ none of them. Not Maxzip. Not ZIP Infinity. Not Zexec. Not NITFOL. Maxzip supposedly does, but what happens when you try to run “Unicode.z5″, a demo that shows all of UNICODE in its glory? It spits out weird errors and crashes. So does every ‘terp but NITFOL. Curiously, the newsgroups say that NITFOL has no UNICODE support, but it survives the attempt.
• No font supports UNICODE in the aforementioned interpreters. Not even the worthy Gentium. Other fonts that should, don’t either, like Tahoma.
• Zcharacter tricks don’t work, no matter what Roger Firth’s site says. You can’t add characters to the Zcharacter map; you can’t replace the map; the same 8859 character set comes through regardless.

What’s more annoying beyond all this? It worked with NO EFFORT on Mac OS X 10.5. I mean, I did buttcheese nothing and it worked. On Windows XP, all I had to do was set the ‘terp font to Gentium and it worked. I didn’t get it to work on Ubuntu (which incidentally still sounds like a tribal profanity to me), but then again, my taste for playing with Linux innards at 5 AM is a bit lacking these days.

This is one of those things that was supposed to work, looked like it could work, and yet mysteriously remains just out of reach, with no-one saying a word. I wish I didn’t have to find out the hard way, you know?

Oh well. I’ll code a routine that looks for Z-spec 1.0 compliance and uses that to determine whether to use UNICODE characters or not, and then write another routine that allows the player to turn it on and off. In other words, what this guy did. After all, UNICODE support is a “purely hypothetical feature”.

I’m frustrated but not surprised, in the end.