Methods for writing non-Roman scripts?

[William Magee]

Greetings.

For an upcoming conference I am researching methods for writing
non-Roman scripts in Second Life.

So far I have implemented two methods for writing the Tibetan script
(try them at http://slurl.com/secondlife/Catocala/171/115/623/):

1. a method based on numerous panels each containing the entire character set

2. a method that uses a server-side PHP script to communicate with the
parcel media url (based on David Wood's LaTeX math whiteboard).

I am looking for other methods for writing and displaying non-Roman
scripts in SL.

All the best,

Bill

Bill Magee, Ph.D.
Dharma Drum Buddhist College
Taiwan
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[Salahzar Stenvaag]

Hi, since I was in SL I was investigating how to express textual content in SL since it was clearly lacking ANY support for this.

And when I found out the xytext solution I was quite struck by its power, genius, and after all, simplicity.

XyText was lacking any supporto for non-english text, while I was living in Europe and simple characters for Italian, Spanish or French

were lacking.

So I "fixed" this lacune internationalizing the xytext with full support of utf-8. You can find some of these investigations here:

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/XyzzyText-UTF8

If Tibetan alphabet is included in utf8 schema (ant includes less than 100 distinct symbols) you can exploit this technology for have high quality boards.

My original project involved with a unique texture with 200 symbols laid in a predefined order, but requires 1 prim for every 5 characters to be drawn, which

requires quite a lot of prims (around 70-100) if you need a quite expressive board.

I also started a project named zztext (http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/ZZText) for a low prim yet relatively low quality character rendering, which includes upload of 35 textures (350L$)

Benefit of this 2nd solution is that you can use a board of around 30-40 prims to display your information.

I also have seen some other solutions involving a bot: you communicate your notecard or text to the bot who render the text on a texture and then uploads on the fly it.

This latest solution can be quite technologically demanding since you have to program your own c# program on your server to handle bot interaction using libopenmvs libraries.

NOTE on bots:

Usage of bots is not clearly understood if acceptable by Linden: so far as I know it is "tolerated" like superprims if used for nospam, educational purpose, but not clear if they will be banned somewhere in the next months :(

Currently they are surely forbidden if you use them to "artificially" increase the traffic of your parcel for marketing purposes.

NOTE on xytext:

while xytext was published since 2006 as opensource on wiki text it always lacked a documentation for building the charset itself. My main contribution was to provide some opensource scripts for doing these layout using photoshop vbscript or gimp python-fu or script-fu scripts. (I'm still not completely happy with the zztext gimp scripts, needing probably some refinement).

Greetings from Italy,

salahzar stenvaag

please email or IM me if you want to try a xytext utf8 solution.

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[Eloise Pasteur]

Some javascript/style in this post has been disabled (why?)

In addition, SL supports UTF8 in scripts, so if Tibetan is represented that way you can create hovertext and have scripted objects speak in Tibetan characters, as well as, assuming you have a keyboard that produces them (or you're good on your UTF8 codes), you can write tibetan characters directly into SL.

El.

On 25 Oct 2009, at 09:30, Salahzar Stenvaag wrote:

Hi, since I was in SL I was investigating how to express textual content in SL since it was clearly lacking ANY support for this.

And when I found out the xytext solution I was quite struck by its power, genius, and after all, simplicity.

XyText was lacking any supporto for non-english text, while I was living in Europe and simple characters for Italian, Spanish or French

were lacking.

So I "fixed" this lacune internationalizing the xytext with full support of utf-8. You can find some of these investigations here:

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/XyzzyText-UTF8

If Tibetan alphabet is included in utf8 schema (ant includes less than 100 distinct symbols) you can exploit this technology for have high quality boards.

My original project involved with a unique texture with 200 symbols laid in a predefined order, but requires 1 prim for every 5 characters to be drawn, which

requires quite a lot of prims (around 70-100) if you need a quite expressive board.

I also started a project named zztext (http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/ZZText) for a low prim yet relatively low quality character rendering, which includes upload of 35 textures (350L$)

Benefit of this 2nd solution is that you can use a board of around 30-40 prims to display your information.

I also have seen some other solutions involving a bot: you communicate your notecard or text to the bot who render the text on a texture and then uploads on the fly it.

This latest solution can be quite technologically demanding since you have to program your own c# program on your server to handle bot interaction using libopenmvs libraries.

NOTE on bots:

Usage of bots is not clearly understood if acceptable by Linden: so far as I know it is "tolerated" like superprims if used for nospam, educational purpose, but not clear if they will be banned somewhere in the next months :(

Currently they are surely forbidden if you use them to "artificially" increase the traffic of your parcel for marketing purposes.

NOTE on xytext:

while xytext was published since 2006 as opensource on wiki text it always lacked a documentation for building the charset itself. My main contribution was to provide some opensource scripts for doing these layout using photoshop vbscript or gimp python-fu or script-fu scripts. (I'm still not completely happy with the zztext gimp scripts, needing probably some refinement).

Greetings from Italy,

salahzar stenvaag

please email or IM me if you want to try a xytext utf8 solution.

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