UTF-8 support for word-wrap

waitingmoon

Hello. I am currently working on a personal project to create a Japanese gamelist.xml that can be used in EmulationStation.

The problem is that EmulationStation only recognizes spaces as delimiters/line breaks, which makes natural word-wrapping of long sentences impossible for certain languages that basically do not use delimiters (such as Japanese and Chinese). This means that writing game descriptions becomes very difficult.

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The RetroPie community in Japan (including Recalbox, etc.) calls this problem the "word wrap problem" and deals with it by either giving up on the description or inserting a space for each character.

To solve this problem, years or so ago, eagle0wl and zigurana edited Font.cpp on their forks.
https://github.com/eagle0wl/EmulationStation/blob/master/es-core/src/resources/Font.cpp

It seemed to work well in the screenshot he uploaded to his blog. Could I ask you to implement a feature similar to this?

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mitu

That could be an interesting challenge.

FWIW, the example from their blog (the 2nd picture) is somehow wrong.
While Japanese does not use spaces to separate the words in a sentence, there are some rules for line breaking in a multi-line text (Kinsoku Kinshori / 禁則処理). According to those rules, the 1st line in the picture should not start with a 「 (LEFT CORNER BRACKET). Am I wrong ?

waitingmoon

Thank you for your interest in my project.

Technically speaking, kinsoku shori is not a required implementation. While it is certainly important, it is just a rule to help you write "readable, understandable, and good-looking Japanese text".

In some cases, you can turn off "Apply line breaking rules to auto line breaks" and intentionally place them at the beginning/end of a sentence.

Lolonois

If this CJK fonts and wordwrap gets picked up at a later stage, just some notes:

Implications have been extensively discussed between Python developers, finally the change was dismissed, but a option to control the word wrap is planned for the textwrap module in v3.11 [2].

[1] https://bugs.python.org/issue24665
[2] https://bugs.python.org/issue12499

mitu

@waitingmoon I've adapted the changes submitted by @Zigurana and eagle0wl and submitted a new PR, which was accepted recently.

If you're using RetroPie, you can install the emulationstation-dev package (from the experimental packages section) and try it out.