topic Re: Archicad has issues with certain Unicode chars in Installation & update

Archicad has issues with certain Unicode chars

runxel — Mon, 09 Nov 2020 01:13:01 GMT

There are certain Unicode characters which actually have two representations:
A "normal" one, and an emoji one.
Take the warning sign „⚠“ (U+26A0) as an example.
Archicad will strip away this character (like any other emoji) from text elements and labels, even if it is totally valid.

I don't need emojis in my plans, but they should render as the classic black and withe glyph.

Re: Archicad has issues with certain Unicode chars

Minh Nguyen — Tue, 17 Nov 2020 11:53:37 GMT

Hello,

Thank you very much for the question and I am very sorry about the issue!

This is a limitation with Archicad text handling. Archicad supports symbols from Unicode plane called Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP), like many other Unicode programs. Emoji characters are not included in this, so we don’t recommend using them.

In certain situations, emojis and symbols are visible, but there is no guarantee that the Archicad will be able to handle these characters correctly elsewhere. Moreover, it can also cause operational anomalies to the string conversion.

I hope this answers your question. Feel free to ask if you have any further issues!

Best regards,
Minh

Re: Archicad has issues with certain Unicode chars

runxel — Tue, 17 Nov 2020 14:33:34 GMT

Hey Minh, thanks for chiming in.
Maybe I wasn't clear enough: I don't need/want to use emojis (Even tho any modern app handles them properly).
It's more on the contrary: I would expect Archicad to display the non-emoji character.

Re: Archicad has issues with certain Unicode chars

Minh Nguyen — Wed, 18 Nov 2020 08:09:34 GMT

Hello,

Thank you very much for the clarification!

Previously I thought ⚠ did not belong to the Basic Multilingual Plane (the only Unicode plane that Archicad support), but upon further checking, it indeed belongs to this plane (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miscellaneous_Symbols). Let me double-check with my colleague to see what their take on this one.

Thank you once again for your answer, and sorry for the misinformation

Best regards,
Minh

Re: Archicad has issues with certain Unicode chars

Minh Nguyen — Tue, 01 Dec 2020 11:52:43 GMT

Hello,

Sorry for keeping you waiting!

After some discussion with my colleagues and developers, these symbols, (in this case the warning sign) belong to the Color font. Color fonts appeared a few years ago. These are also OpenType fonts, but contain information for color glyphs in SVG, BMP, ... format. Color fonts are not supported by Win32 GDI, therefore some glitch might happen when we use it in Archicad.

I hope this answers your questions! If you have any further issues, feel free to let me know!

Best regards,
Minh