Lately I have noticed, that people are having trouble to use Text objects with special characters in Blender 2.5x. Why? Because blender will not let you to enter characters other than ACII. There are some work-arounds, but they are time consuming and inefficient. So, I thought why not to help fellow Blender users, and not to write Add-On for that?
Idea was simple: let people add characters by character code. Later it was extended by possibility to import text from external file. Currently it is still open to suggestions for further improvements.
Awesome as awesome can be
i was a bit frustrated as i can’t past characters from clipboard into text object.
one suggestion though, can you implement a reverse string operator in it for RTL languages?
you can add it as a check box, i can help you with that
thanks for this great addon, and i’m including it in my next build (if Allah wishes)
ok, tested and works okay but it doesn’t support all unicode chars, and it would be good if you could input using Unicode like this U+FEF1, instead of to searching through code numbers.
bat3a: I have added option to insert character at the beginning of the line. Script updated at the download location. Thanks for your comments.
I also was thinking about entering hexadecimal code directly, since unicode marks characters in hex. But Blender does not have nice slider for hexadecimals, like regular IntegerProperty has (at least I don’t know). Seems like it is still needed, so I will add it in the next update.
Font support is limited by the selected font, and font of the UI. I haven’t seen an unicode font, which supports all the characters
this might it make easy to understand more about this thing and
why the correct unicode-number is not enough and the selected
font has to be made for such a number too.
Font support is limited by the selected font, and font of the UI. I haven’t seen an unicode font, which supports all the characters
check the blender “2.60\datafiles\fonts” folder, it has a unicode font which supports all languages i think!, it could help you with tests.
as more testing, i found it does not import unicode files or utf-8 ones.
i’d like to give you another suggestion:
you can link a text field to the text object and it modifies on entering edit mode and outing of edit mode.
bat3a: it does import utf-8 files flawlessly. If you see rectangles instead of characters - your font does not support given characters. I have made a test file, with quite exotic characters. You can test it, and don’t be surprised to see a lot of rectangles - it’s a matter of font. Btw, best results I have achieved with FreeSans (FreeSans.ttf) font. It does not support Chinese symbols, but almost everything else looks fine.
Hi!
I’ve just test this awesome script with Hebrew text file and got strange character after that I test it with your test text file and got an error (see pictures below, Blender rev 41207)
another thing, I have an idea and want to hear what do you think:
can you add text box for adding characters and a start Unicode position text box so you will add the start Unicode position of the first character and enter only the offset? (you can add also a drop box of the starting point of each language to choose from for help).
Thank you for this script, it will be helpful a lot!!! :yes:
@yaniv: let me guess, you have opened utf8_test.txt with windows notepad, saved it, and tried to import it in blender with Unicode Helper? Despite the fact, that windows notepad is the worst text editor, it is even worse when it comes to editing UTF-8 files. When saving UTF-8 with notepad, it adds some bytes at the beginning of the file, to indicate, that it’s utf-8 file. And those bytes are not real symbols. Python fails to map those bytes to char, and it fails. Solution: don’t use notepad. My recommendation for windows is Notepad++, in linux default gedit works just fine. Of course I will add exception handling to avoid this error too.
About the idea… it sounds complicated, and I think it will be solved easier, when unicode input will be available in 2.61. This Add-On will serve only for characters, that you cannot reach with keyboard.
@bat3a: I am attaching screenshots, how utf8_test.txt looks in editor, and in blender
