HL Feature Request

[Shifty-eyes]

For most people, this is probably a non-issue. But after using HL for several years, is there any way to use extended Latin character sets? Let's face it—like any metal band will tell you, nothing adds masculine umpf! like an umlaut:

Thörag the Dwarven Mouse Eater
François, Épée de esprit de corps!
Luís Hérnán Cortés, “The Town Drunk” (Note the “curly” quotes)
Ållænd, The Nøråd

Ok. I think you get the point. I'm guessing that within the application, there's probably just a line or two (or ten?) of code that you could adjust to point the character set to Unicode or something more extended than what we're getting.

If there's a work-around hack that I could do at home, I'd love to attempt that, too.

Thanks!

 

[liz]

Shifty-eyes, are you talking about specifically in the Hero's name? I tested and I was able to copy the examples you gave into the Hero's Name space, and all of the special characters carried over. They also appeared in printed versions. Were you looking for the special characters to be available in other areas?

 

[mirtos]

The problem with that Liz, is that you have to enter it in another program and cut and paste.

I imagine Shift-eyes was suggesting it would be nice if you could switch the character sets directly within Hero Lab rather than cut and paste.

Just guessing.

But I guess the work around/hack is do it one program and cut and paste into Hero Lab.

 

[Shifty-eyes]

Diacritical Marks

I hadn't thought about cutting and pasting. BUT if I were to type something from within Hero Lab, I usually end up with a error message:

One or more of the letters in "Kit Zenkō" could not be represented in the text field, and will be ignored. This version of Hero Lab does not support foreign-language character sets - this is something we plan on addressing in a future release.​

Clicking on OK causes the ō to become a question mark. This happens in any field including journal entries, notes, etc. It can be irritating while working in Editor and you've just copied/pasted something with curly quotation marks…now I have to hunt down each one and any other symbol or letter that HL didn't like.

I've been using Hero Lab for a while, and I want that feature NOW! Ok, I can wait a bit longer. ;-)

Current version is 6.0a on Mac Yosemite (was Mavericks until this weekend). Can this be changed with a few lines of code as I had postulated? or this more complex that I'm giving it credit?

Thanks for your responses!

 

[liz]

Shifty-eyes, thanks for the clarification. I'll flag this to the HL team to see if they can comment on this a little more specifically.

 

[liz]

So good news, Shifty-eyes. It turns out Steve, one of our HL Developers, is currently working on this! If everything goes according to plan, we're hoping to get this into Beta "soon". (The quotes allow for any wiggle room we may need )

 

[Colen]

Can this be changed with a few lines of code as I had postulated? or this more complex that I'm giving it credit?

To elaborate on this - yes, it's more complex. The underlying engine that powers Hero Lab was built back when everyone assumed that the good ol' Roman alphabet was all we'd ever need to support. Changing Hero Lab to allow the full suite of available characters to be used means going through and tweaking a lot of code that interacts with Windows - opening files, creating windows, and so on.

As Liz mentioned, now that Hero Lab for iPad is out, we've had a developer working on this for the last few weeks, and we're planning to release a beta soon. If you're interested, please sign up with the link in this (old) post:

http://www.wolflair.com/blog/2013/12/13/help-us-beta-test-hero-lab/

And we'll send you an email once the new beta is ready.

 

[Shifty-eyes]

Thanks!