Bitmap SpriteFonts localization ?

Does monogame bitmap spritefonts support localization for other languages specially for Chinese, Japanese, etc?

I think it just renders the fonts to a sprite, it doesn’t matter what symbols as far as i know. If your selected font supports these symbols then spritefont will render them.

Ya spritefont is basically just a image with a text file for what letters are represented in the image by a rectangle location so extra data for how you place them when you draw them.

Drawstring just reads a string you give it and uses that text files info to draw the corresponding letters sprites as quads. Using what boils down to a normal drawIndexedPrimitive. The letters in the string you send to drawstring match up in the spritefont fileto what are called glyphs, but its really just a glorified spritesheet filled with sprites. Just a file that lists what and how to draw each sprite in it and what character is at were within it.

It’s not like it can translate a string of english into chinese or this text ive just written into chinese. You could turn your letters into corresponding keyboard characters on a chinese keyboard but that wont do you much good it’ll still be jibberish to the guy on the other end unless he speaks english.

How its done is like this…

For standard messages think about writing them all into a file in your own language and reading them in and using just that for your game messages.
Later you can make other equivalent language files based on your english master text file.
You can then ship it with more then one language text file for your game

You could even use google translate if you can’t get help on that master file.
Translating that or if you had a chinese friend or german one ect…
Who could translate it so it made sense that would be even better
.
Including a chinese spritefont that has all the required letters for your file would be great.
Now you can draw that translated file for your buddy in china with his own characters.

You could use the system environment or localization to get the users country code and on install and mark that in a file and when the app starts switch to the chinese spritesheet and text file. Numbers are pretty universal so any chinese spritefont should have the chinese number versions too.

It is important with Asian languages to only generate font glyphs for the text you are going to use. This because generating font texture pages containing the potentially several thousand glyphs that cover Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Japanese and/or Korean is not feasible.

@dellis1972 has an pending PR to add localized support to the content pipeline for SpriteFont to do just this.