View Full Version : Greek (unicode characters) does not work yet in XBMC for Mac OS X
sigalakos
2008-02-08, 10:51
:no:
I use the latest XBMC 0.1 on a mac mini. Everything works great but I can't get Greek to display correctly both on the menus / filenames and for movie subtitles. I tried changing them from the settings to both ISO and Windows Greek, but did not work.
I opened the XBMC.app package and went to Resources/XBMC/Languages/greek to inspect the xml's and they look fine. I even copied some more ttf fonts from my mac (that support greek) to the media/fonts location but no dice...
I suspect that the language settings are simply ignored by XBMC. Anyone on this?
matt_cyr
2008-02-08, 16:59
Did you change the setting within xbmc or just on your mac?
You need to change it in the xbmc settings
matt_cyr
2008-02-08, 17:15
edit: That is, of course, if the feature has been implemented yet.
I haven't used XBOX for Mac OS myself so am not sure.
Gamester17
2008-02-08, 17:35
I am not sure but do you first not have to replace arial.ttf with arialuni.ttf (renamed to arial.ttf) in order to add unicode font support before you change the settings in XBMC?
Seach the whole forums for "arialuni.ttf" and you will find much more information about fonts.
I am not sure but do you first not have to replace arial.ttf with arialuni.ttf (renamed to arial.ttf) in order to add unicode font support before you change the settings in XBMC?
it is indeed what i always had to do to get chinese and japanese to work with xbmc on the original XBOX.
chinese (and unicode) dont work at all for the time being, that is with arial.ttf. i haven't tried myself but as gamester17 mentioned, it will most certainly work by changing arial.ttf with arialuni.ttf.
to enable unicode:
- right click on XBMC.app and choose "view package content"
- go to / media / fonts
- copy arialuni.ttf to this location. authenticate if needed.
- choose arialuni.tf in XBMC settings (appearance > region)
Has anyone actually tried this? It didn't work for me. Please experiment and let me know.
Thanks,
-elan
i cant seem to find this font on the web, otherwise i would try...
in theory it should work! :nod:
by the way, in "look and feel", did you change the skin fonts to arialuni?
ok, if you have ms office in osx, arialuni is installed on your computer; it is called arial unicode.ttf. you can find it with spotlight...
i tried to do what i described above. i know it works on the xbox, it is the way to get, for instance, english interface with unicode charset or full chinese interface. well, it doesnt work with 0.1. it does switch to arial unicode, you can see the font seem slightly different after the change. however changing language or charset to chinese doesnt work at all and displays crap.
sigalakos
2008-02-13, 20:49
Hi guys! Tried the suggested swap with Arial Unicode.ttf but it didn't work... In the Region settings I can choose between Greek (Windows) and Greek (ISO). Perhaps the problem is the absence of UTF-8? :nerd:
just to clearify.
the encoding setting is there for anything that is NOT utf-8.
the entire gui is utf-8. if text is considered to not be utf-8 the charset is used as the source charset in the from-foo-to-utf-8 conversion routines.
sigalakos
2008-02-14, 11:58
OK. Good to know that!
Hopefully this is an easy bug to fix for OSXBMC. :nerd::nerd:
sigalakos
2008-02-23, 12:14
:nerd:Hi. I filed this as an official bug yesterday. It seems to be a problem with all non latin characters:
http://dn-0.com/xbmc-trac/ticket/70
Here is a screenshot of not properly displaying Greek:
http://img235.imageshack.us/img235/5876/picture1yk7.jpg
I'd just like to add that most characters outside the good old ascii (a-z & A-Z) don't work either when selecting a Language other than english. I've tried my native language, swedish, as well as german and french none of these laguanges special characters are rendered correctly.
I tried to replace the default arial.ttf (and the PMIII FrancophilSans.ttf font) with the Arial Unicode MS one without any luck.
Also, there's a funny 'Â' character between the digits representing the temperature and the temperature unit (F/C) in the weather display. 6 degrees celsius is displayed 6°C instead of 6°C.
I spent a BUNCH of time on this today without any luck so far. Something about the Unicode support isn't agreeing with OS X. I'll keep pounding away at it, but all the "western" European languages should work without replacing any fonts (once I fix the bug!), to the best of my knowledge.
jmarshall
2008-02-24, 09:16
elan_osx: Essentially what you need to do is make sure the strings that enter XBMC are converted to UTF8. On the xbox version, we do a charset->UTF8 conversion in FileHD/HDDirectory - this is probably not required on OSX?? The charset selection defines the source charset (i.e. what the filesystem is feeding us).
Once the string is in UTF8, XBMC takes care of conversion to UTF16 for rendering.
Cheers,
Jonathan
In an attempt to help out as I suspect this problem might be twofold, here are some more input on this issue:
First, our 'test data' for this session will be the swedish word for 'weather' which is 'väder'. That 'ä' is a regular 'a' with two dots above it.
After changing the language (in Settings->Appearance->Region->Language) to swedish the part of the main XBMC screen look like this:
http://www.stellrot.se/pictures/weather_main.png
After this I create a folder called 'Väder' in my local ~/Movies/ folder on my Mac:
http://www.stellrot.se/pictures/weather_mac_folder.png
When browsing to this folder it's displayed as:
http://www.stellrot.se/pictures/weather_mac_volume.png
To complicate this even further I create a similar 'Väder' folder on my main media server which is a Windows share:
http://www.stellrot.se/pictures/weather_smb_folder.png
After I have mounted this smb volume manually in the Finder, XBMC displays this folder as:
http://www.stellrot.se/pictures/weather_smb_volume.png
In other words it's back to how XBMC displayed 'Väder' on the main screen.
So I guess the conclusion is:
none of these examples shows the 'ä' character correctly
filenames on a mac volume are displayed differently from those on smb shares
Hopefully this info is somewhat helpful.
Cheers,
Michael
elan_osx: Essentially what you need to do is make sure the strings that enter XBMC are converted to UTF8. On the xbox version, we do a charset->UTF8 conversion in FileHD/HDDirectory - this is probably not required on OSX?? The charset selection defines the source charset (i.e. what the filesystem is feeding us).
Once the string is in UTF8, XBMC takes care of conversion to UTF16 for rendering.
Cheers,
Jonathan
Thanks for writing. In my explorations today, I was mostly looking at RSS feeds (just to focus on a particular instance of the problem). The strings are in perfect UTF-8, and then get converted via iconv to WCHAR_T (where Windows/XBox use UTF-16LE). This seemed a bit odd, although it seems to work for regular ASCII, but other characters don't end up right. I'm not sure where the problem is exactly (yet).
So conversion to UTF-8 may be one problem, but there's also a problem with characters once they're in UTF-8. Ah, I18N, what a lovely thing.
-elan
In an attempt to help out as I suspect this problem might be twofold, here are some more input on this issue:
Thanks a bunch, Michael, very helpful.
-elan
I found part of the problem. On linux, the iconv destination encoding is "WCHAR_T". That means “the system dependent and locale dependent wide character encoding”. If that doesn't sound portable, it's because it's not. On OS X this ends up converting to UTF-8, which is exactly what XBMC doesn't want. Hence the multi-character garbage for each non-ASCII character!
However, when I change it to convert to UTF-16LE (like Windows), something goes wrong (must be someone else messing with the string?), because then we get only every other character printed.
Very strange, and damn frustrating.
sigalakos
2008-02-24, 21:19
Elan, don't let that stupid bug bring you down! Perhaps you should ask another friendly mac developer on Twitter or sth. Seems easier than messing with Apple Developer's Q&A. :eek:
http://www.osxbmc.com/2008/02/24/finally-nailed-the-font-issue/
I haven't tried anything with the huge Unicode font for Greek, but give it a try with the next release, it will probably work for you!
-elan
sigalakos
2008-02-25, 01:43
I will but it seems like you nailed it! Can't wait for the next release :nod:
This issue solved in XBMC on Mac?
I'm using 8.10 Atlantis. In Menu, I can see Korean character. But in broswing files, I have a problem. Korean letters are decomposed in filename.
I tried plex and it works well and no problem.
This issue solved in XBMC on Mac?
I'm using 8.10 Atlantis. In Menu, I can see Korean character. But in broswing files, I have a problem. Korean letters are decomposed in filename.
I tried plex and it works well and no problem.
I found exactly same bug.
I report a bug in trac.
http://xbmc.org/trac/ticket/5924
Just for the record, this bug has been reported already. somehow I could not find the bug report with my bad search ;p
http://xbmc.org/trac/ticket/5658
I sent a message to elan, since plex doesn't have this specific bug.
jmarshall
2009-02-17, 22:32
It was originally "fixed" within the XBMC source tree, given the date of elan's post above.
Give full details as to how to reproduce it, for non-korean, english-only plebs such as myself, and we'll take a look. It may be a simple regression that hasn't been identified as yet.
Cheers,
Jonathan
It was originally "fixed" within the XBMC source tree, given the date of elan's post above.
Give full details as to how to reproduce it, for non-korean, english-only plebs such as myself, and we'll take a look. It may be a simple regression that hasn't been identified as yet.
Cheers,
Jonathan
I appreciate your interest on the bug. I didn't think about the situation more carefully.
Now, I add a zip on trac which have files with korean letters.
I think the bug I am talking about may not be the same bug elan fixed here.
I just choose similar thread because I don't know exact nature of the bug.
Thanks,
Youngcho