How Can I Get Foreign Characters to Properly Display in Descriptions?

GaucheArtist

As the title says, I'm trying to include Japanese characters in a game's meta data, but the description only displays it using a series of "." characters.

Information is hard to come by on this topic, although someone had suggested that I need to change the theme's font. They didn't elaborate further, and I don't see any options for that in either UI Settings or ES Themes, so I've come here to see if anyone could point me in the right direction.

Information:
• Raspberry Pi 4 Model B
• Clean flash of the recent RetroPie 4.8 image

mitu

The theme can define what font (.ttf file) to be used - the default font used by ES (OpenSansSerif) does not have all the CJK characters/codepoints implemented.
With the right font, that includes the Japanese UTF8 codepoints, text will be displayed correctly.

GaucheArtist

@mitu Great, it seems like a simple replacement. Looking at the folder structure for the default Carbon-2021 theme, I see:

etc/emulationstation/themes/carbon-2021/art/Cabin-Bold.ttf

Would that be the correct file I'd need to replace, or is there somewhere else I should be looking?

EDIT: Follow-up, using FileZilla, I'm getting a write permission denied error when trying to transfer the new font into this folder. Any way to bypass it?

mitu

@GaucheArtist said in How Can I Get Foreign Characters to Properly Display in Descriptions?:

Any way to bypass it?

Don't modify the theme installed by RetroPie-Setup, since it will be overwritten by an upgrade. Instead, copy the theme to $HOME/.emulationstation/themes/<theme_name> and modify it there. Name the theme folder differently, so there can be no ambiguity when choosing it in EmulationStation.

GaucheArtist

@mitu Following the instructions here, I was able to get the theme to appear in my list, but when trying to apply it, I'm kicked to the terminal with the error:

emulationstation: /home/pi/RetroPie-Setup/tmp/build/emulationstation/es-core/src/resources/Font.cpp:21: Font: :FontFace: :FontFace(ResourceData&&, int): Assertion '!err' failed.
Aborted

I replaced the .ttf in the new theme's "art" folder and also modified the corresponding theme.xml to include the new font's file name. Not sure if I overlooked something else that's required.

mitu

If you're sure the .ttf file is a valid TrueType font file, then check that the name of the file is correct in the theme file. Remember that Linux filesystems are case sensitive, so make sure the file's name is correct.

GaucheArtist

@mitu Discovered my problem. There were actually two theme.xml files that needed editing, the first in the root of the designated theme and a second copy in the retropie subfolder.

Sure enough, modifying both theme.xml files got the font working!