Yep, I've gone off the deep end, but I figured it wouldn't be fair to leave anyone out by NOT including any possible interesting character.
I've compiled this from ONLY TWO FONTS, albeit ones that are included with Windows, but nevertheless, only two in order to make things easier.
I also spent a couple hours to get this all hacked together so that it properly displays in WordPad (which was a nightmare because WordPad wanted to dictate the incorrect fonts to apply). Everything but one part displays in WordPad, the sole outlier needs the characters pasted into Notepad -- or to open the file in Notepad, which works for everything, except the very last category.
FOR THE DEVS:
Here is the file containing all the requested characters. It is even categorized. :P
There are certainly a number of them that at minimum, would be of quite a lot of interest, some of which might not be immediately obvious as to why but I'd be happen to explain how I'd utilize them and think others would be interested in doing as well.
FOR QUICK REFERENCE:
To get an idea of everything available, here are screenshots comprising everything in the file (except for technical details at the top of the file):
@MrGreen No problem and you're welcome :)
Thanks for helping spread the word with it.
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(BTW I realized last night that the non-TextMesh Pro font system actually does support all the Unicode characters, as they all show up perfectly fine in Overload. That gave me a bit of reassurance that I may have correctly understood how TextMesh functions, as if it utilized the underlying UI's capabilities, then we wouldn't be seeing unsupported characters. Either way, good that at least it's not an underlying system that's lacking the support!)
@EnzoDiazUnofficial I completely 100% agree. I'm actually surprised that the base language characters weren't supported, given we do have players from around the globe. (Though admittedly, CJK subset alone has almost 21,000 characters *gulp*)
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Now... That is not an excuse, or even a claim that it's "too many", because Minecraft supports all of those any many more, which at one point was also using an character-image system. I spent lots of time for my server, coming up with cool and beautiful user tags with the various exotic languages it supported. (The African Languages characters [font "Ebrima"] holds a special significance for me as I portrayed the Greek primordial "Khaos" on my server, and fashioned a name out of characters from those languages: ꗣⶋꗇⵙꗟ )
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But, I digress :P
It'd indeed be great for those to also be given support. I think I have an idea perhaps on why they are be causing performance loss in SP, but I'm out of my element in that regard to know for certain...
Either way, I think it might be due to the placement in the rendering chain, and maybe moving it up higher so that it doesn't have Post-Processing applied, could help? The fact they cast shadows seems to mean they are having extra processing applied to them, but whether the extra processing is necessary for them to look right, is the unknown for me...
@Formula350 Thanks for explaining this! I really appreciate how much work you put into this, and I think the rest of the community agrees with me!
@AngularMomentum haha Touche
(Although that'd flat out be a request for a different Font Style, as opposed to characters universal to all the included Fonts.)
@Bellcat @MrGreen The thing is, I don't think TextMesh Pro actually CARES about Unicode, UTF-8, or ASCII... Because, if I've followed their documentation correctly (source 1) all of the letters, numbers, and characters get converted into a single, giant 2D Texture (aka Atlas) which then gets referenced based on a coordinate system that corresponds to the particular character you want to have "typed" on the screen.
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You run a Font through their conversion utility and it converts the fonts into textures, or more accurately I guess they're closer to ye-olde "Sprites". I believe this is also part of the reason behind the (third party) company's choice in naming the Unity plugin: TextMesh Pro, as it displays everything using Meshes?
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Either way, the give-away for me, that these were being rendered is two fold:
1) The Update Notes they gave us for v1.11 in one of the blogs, indicated that the more text you have displayed, the more memory that's required by SP (I don't remember if they specified, but it'd be VRAM here, which is important since that's different from system memory in most cases)
2) If you pay attention in Designer when a Label is distanced from your build, it casts a Shadow. :P
Now... Even IF that's not the case (that they're not 'texture' assets), and encoding does matter here...
I won't pretend to know this for a fact, but, if I'm understanding this right then they DO currently support Unicode, or at least UTF-8 -- which would be sufficient to cover most of what I suggested. (Pretty sure the Undefined and Private Use would indeed require full, proper Unicode support.)
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My 'evidence' here (using Arial font) is that these Arrows already work in the game: ←↑→↓
Yet, for their Character Code, CharMap only displays the Unicode option:
U+2190,U+2191,U+2192,U+2192.Where understanding is, if they were old-school ASCII they would _also _ offer an ALT Code; for example the "currency sign": ¤ is
Alt+0164.
My 2 cents at least...
The labels should use unicode instead of ASCII
Unfortunately, most of these symbols will result in the same square because such fonts do not support them. Maybe Junior should consult the creators of ASCII.
No comic sans?
Thats a lot of stuffs
@AndrewGarrison @WNP78
Sorry, but having spent quite the amount of time compiling and formatting that, I'm not risking it to chance that it gets seen... :}