Hello all!
Does anyone have any experience using Sprite fonts with non-Latin character sets. I'm working on getting my game translated into Chinese, Japanese and a few other languages with non-Latin characters sets.
* One option is to get a list of every character used and put all the characters from every language in one giant sprite font, but I imagine it'd be way too large.
* I wish there was some sort of "Load sprite for sprite font" action.
* But otherwise I think it'd be good to have one sprite font per language. I have something kinda working with families, but it's very complicated with two English sprite fonts
Any other ideas? Thanks!!
Hey man, I made a good system for selecting multiple languages in my last game. You can see it here.
I had one spritefont for English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and then one spritefont for each of Russian, Korean, Japanese and Simplified Chinese.
You've probably found it already, but if not the Sprite Font Generator (GYFM) tool made by 
blackhornet does most of the hard work for you.
You need the character set for each language. The way I was generating this was to get all your game's text for one language into a text document (every phrase, button caption paragraph of text your game contains) then copy paste it into the GYFM text field. The program automatically removes duplicate characters. Then it generates a png of your characters and spacing data you can enter into the C3 spritefont plugin.
You also need to find a font that contains all the characters you need (not all fonts will contain korean, japanese, chinese characters etc). And your chosen font also needs to look good when scaled down and turned into a sprite font. Arial Unicode has every language I think, and looks ok at low point size.
Then in your game, you can load your character set from a file into a dictionary depending on what language the player selects. Then at the start of each layout where you have text to display, load the text from the dictionary.