Writing in a language other than Ceti Basic.

[Gangstafary]

What says in the title. Just as you can set a default language to speak or momentarily change languages using the ",prefixes", make players able to write in other languages than Ceti Basic.

[Sheeplets]

Bump, because I've wanted this for ages.

[Carver]

Perhaps this could call for some addition to the clerical tools of antagonists, investing small amounts of TCs so as to be able to forge documents in their non-native languages.

[Skull132]

I once had code for this. I remember my initial drive fizzled after people were unable to provide me with fonts to do shit with when I asked.

[Mofo1995]

As Skull said he was fully prepared to do it if species maintainers would provide him with fonts. At the time I was tajara developer and I know I failed to find one that wasnt just legible English written strangely. He did provide everyone with a website of free fonts to help though. 

Edit: this was circa 1 year ago

Edited March 2, 2020 by Mofo1995

[Gangstafary]

I'm confused about the fonts issue... Can't it just be exactly as it is in speech, but written?

[Pratepresidenten]

Why do we need fancy fonts? Better the function than form!

[KingOfThePing]

So you can differentiate the languages from one another. The same reason spoken languages have different colours.

This, obviously cannot work here, since, you know, coloured pencils exist 

[Gangstafary]

I think people responding to this are looking at a finger which is pointing them to the moon.

Aesthetics is the least of my concerns when suggesting this feature. You don't really need different fonts for this, the functionality would remain the same, and due to phonotactics one could still know which language it is. Given the case of non-human languages which have different alphabets, any kind of symbols or default fonts could be used. As another possible measure, upon using a piece of paper as to read it, a line of text could indicate that you do so and see it's in Freespeak, for example, or "it's a text composed of strange characters" if the language is unspokable by a given person.

Edited March 4, 2020 by Gangstafary

[KingOfThePing]

You dont need to be able to speak a language to guess or know which language it is. 

Your suggestion is also flawed, since one paper can have multiple different languages written on it, which would surely lead to problems with examining it and getting a sentence like you proposed 

[GreenBoi]

To pile onto what King said by a bit, I will only support this if it's possible to write a language w/o being able to speak it or speak w/o being capable of writing. This isn't exactly a rare issue, and it's very common for those studying languages as they just might find one easier than the other (I've always found it easier to read than speak personally).

[Gangstafary]

20 hours ago, KingOfThePing said:

You dont need to be able to speak a language to guess or know which language it is. 

Your suggestion is also flawed, since one paper can have multiple different languages written on it, which would surely lead to problems with examining it and getting a sentence like you proposed 

I specifically addressed that when talking about phonotactics. In-game, you can know which language an unknown language is cause Sol sounds like an asian language, Freespeak sounds like gargle, Tradeband sounds like latin, etc etc.

Addressing what you say about a paper being able to contain many different languages... You have a point, I didn't think of that, although I assume there can be workarounds for that, though they'd require more coding headache.