Non-English Languages & Fonts in Flash MX

[Weird Science]

Greetings. I have a potential project coming up where the client wants the entire site in flash, and in eight languages:

French, English, Chinese, Spanish, German, Russian, Italian, Greek

I've seen flash movies in most of these languages, but my question is this: at this stage, what does one have to keep in mind to be able to work with flash movies in these languages? I'm especially concerned about Chinese - it is as simple as embedded fonts, or is it much more complicated? I would be happy to hear from those to have produced sites in any of the above languages (besides English, of course) and what problems they encountered.

Many thanks in advance.

WS

[fontDJ]

Chinese is as simple as embedded fonts

[Weird Science]

But how does one go about that? Chinese has many more letters than one can type on an English keyboard....

And where does one find an official Chinese language font library?

[fontDJ]

i'm chinese.you can contact me.
foontdj@hotmail.com

[Weird Science]

I tried emailing you, but i got it kicked back. Are you sure that's the right email?

[Tw4win]

Hiya,

I'm an engineer for a translation company and I deal with this sort of thing everyday. The languages that you metion fall into two categories single-byte(French, Spanish, German, Russian, Greek) and double-byte (Chinese). This designation refers to how many bytes (as in computer storage) it takes to create a single character in a given font. So, single-byte languages take 1 byte while double byte languages take 2.

Single-byte Languages:
You won't have any trouble here. Just download a Russian and Greek font and you're good to go.

Double-byte:
Here's where the problem begins. Windows was written for singel-byte languages with double-byte support added later. Therefore, I suggest that you work in a localized (Chinese) version of Windows or Win 2000/XP because they offer Chinese character support. You'll also need a localized version of Flash MX if you want to be able to type or cut/paste Chinese directly into Flash. If you don't have a localized version of Flash you can create text files (saved with Chinese Encoding) and import them into your application. There is a turorial on Flashkit that shows you how to do this.

Both Photoshop and Fireworks support Chinese so you'll have no problem createing graphics for your Flash app.

If you want further help feel free to contact me: meverha1@hotmail.com

[danielrod]

A few corrections/clarifications to the previous post...

Win NT, Win2K & Win XP support Unicode and traditional double-byte code pages, so you don't need a localized system for Chinese support.

I just copied chinese characters in my english version of Win2K and english version of Flash MX and exported w/no data loss.

Bottom line: you only need WinNT or higher w/you your system locale set to Chinese, and english version of MX in order to work with Chinese.

Best regards,

--Daniel