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07-31-12, 11:01 PM   #8
Phanx
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Originally Posted by Qupe View Post
... why Chinese characters (etc..) were being printed into chat without any formatting.
I believe this is a new "feature" to prevent people from seeing overlapping question marks in place of a message containing characters the chat font doesn't support. If a message contains any unsupported characters, the entire message is shown in a "default" font that includes those characters. See the attached file for an example screenshot.

Unfortunately, the font file that gets used is NOT any of the files in the Fonts folder, so you can't override it that way. At least, placing font files in a Fonts folder with the same names as all of the fonts in the Blizzard Fonts folder (listed in Vladinator's post above) has no effect -- messages with East Asian characters still appear in Friz Quadrata.

I looked through the Blizzard UI code some, and didn't find any code related to this "feature", so I'm not sure how it can be overridden at all, aside from writing your own chat frames from scratch.

It would be a lot less obnoxious if they only changed the font file, instead of also overwriting the size, outline, and shadow.

I tried logging into the game in Korean and Simplified Chinese to see how the user's locale affects this behavior, but was unable to do so... and since I can't read either of those languages, I don't know why, because I can't read the error message that pops up.

On a side note, this behavior does not seem to affect Russian characters; if you're using a custom font that doesn't support them, you'll still see question marks, and if your font does support them, you'll see them without any ugly font changes.
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Last edited by Phanx : 07-31-12 at 11:59 PM.