City of Heroes: Live Forum Archive

Guide on How to insert Nifty Symbols into CoH/V

Baba_Kanoosh

By Baba_Kanoosh,
Posted on: 2008-05-26 15:07 in Player Guides

 

Posted

OK I have a radiation defender and seen some cool symbols in text one day and thought...how cool is that, I could make a bind on my AM to say, "Gather for AM" with radiation symbols.

So after some research and some chatting, I was taught the ways of UNICODE. Now a year or so later, people still love 'em and ask how to do it. So here is a down and dirty guide on how to insert symbols into your text.

Step one, find UNICODEs online and convert them using MICROSOFT Word™

A good link I found is here: All about UNICODE . It is the official site for the UNICODEs used today. Read into it if that is your bag, baby.

To get the symbols, find the sequence of numbers that is assigned to that symbol, again I will offer this site here: UNICODE List on Wikipedia .

Once you have found the symbol you want, then copy the code and paste it into a new Microsoft Word document. Highlight the code, and press Alt and X keys at same time. It will convert the code to the symbol.

Example:
U+2122
highlight and press ALT X at same time

you get the trademark symbol (as I used in this text) ™

OK, from there it is easy, highlight the symbol in the Microsoft Word Document, and press CONTROL C at same time.

Go into your CoH/V game and then press CONTROL V at same time to paste it in. Include the symbols in binds and macros to save time.

I made a list of symbols on Microsoft word one day to save me time and effort, I use the page as a basic copy board so to speak. Enjoy and don't go too crazy with them. Occasional use of them is unique, spamming them in every chat gets old, fast.
FYI, UNICODES are trickier in websites, HTML, etc, some of the methods used here won't work in this forum for example. How do I know? I tried and then researched my oops. That's where the edit came in.

"Oh NO! I'm so sorry baba! you and your wife will be sorely missed...s#@!, i did it again, didn't I?" - mintmiki
Animal Farm ID:71800
When Alts Collide: 134432

 

Posted

I [heart] this thread.

You can also use Unicode to flip text upside-down. I'm not sure whether you can paste it into the game or not; I haven't tried that. But if other unicode symbols work, I would think this should too.

 

Posted

Now if only they'd allow this in the ID page of the character creator... Every week I get asked what part of Brazil I'm from because I can't put a "u acute" accent marker in my character's name ("Raúl") at account creation. He's supposed to be a 15th century Moor but, without being able to stress the second vowel, it simply comes across as Brazilian Portugese...

Oh well... It's a minor quibble at best.

 

Posted

Anyone know the simplest way to do this through OpenOffice?

 

Posted

Great information. Thanks.

 

Posted

The Unicode support in CoX has other uses, as well. Way back, around Issue 2, my character was in Peregrine Island when I saw, in the chat window, another character's chat containing the three Cyrillic characters for 'dlya' ('de', 'el', 'ya', spelling the Russian word for 'for'). This turned out to be a transmission error; the character whose chat it was had no idea they'd done it. However, I was intrigued and investigated further.

I discovered that you could use many of the online translation web pages (such as the Google Language Tools or PROMT's translation page. For characters outside the normal 8-bit ASCII, you need to have a font that supports the Unicode page of the language your translating into, or you won't see the translated text correctly. And some languages, you'll find, are either not supported properly in CoX or in the font that CoX uses to display chat text; I haven't found out which yet. For Russian, Japanese, some Chinese (Korean should work, given that CoH was released in Korea, but I haven't tried that), and languages that differ from standard ASCII mostly in the use of diacriticals (i.e., German, the Scandinavian languages, etc.), it works well. I use the translation tool to translate text from English to the other language, and then copy and paste the translated output into a bind. For example, with the characters I have that have Russian backgrounds, I would take the standard F7 ('Ready!') bind and change it so that the character says (in Cyrillic letters) 'Gotoviy!', or 'UBEGITE!' instead of 'RUN!' for F6, or 'POMOSH!' instead of 'HELP' for F8 (keeping the original colors and any poses). Then I would make up a set of binds for 'Hello!', 'Welcome', 'Congratulations!', etc. Because actually editing the binds was impossible with a normal text editor, I eventually turned up BabelPad, a free Unicode-enabled text editor, which let me edit saved bind files containing Unicode directly.

"But in our enthusiasm, we could not resist a radical overhaul of the system, in which all of its major weaknesses have been exposed, analyzed, and replaced with new weaknesses."
-- Bruce Leverett, Register Allocation in Optimizing Compilers

 

Posted

Bumping this as I had a few folks asking about it and was kinda hard to dig up.

"Oh NO! I'm so sorry baba! you and your wife will be sorely missed...s#@!, i did it again, didn't I?" - mintmiki
Animal Farm ID:71800
When Alts Collide: 134432