Hi there,
I'm a hobbyist based in Prague and I'm making a Pulp game with my kid. We're writing the dialog in the Czech language but Pulp does not support extended character sets or characters with diacritics so the language looks all broken and hard to read (especially for the kids).
Of course the ideal solution would be to support UNICODE (Bitsy does support it). If that's not feasible I (and I assume that other hobbyists too) would be able to create the additional characters myself but the font editor doesn't allow to add any more characters. Would it be possible to add more character slots so that people can create fonts that support languages with diacritics?
I believe this would make Pulp more popular among amateur developers in many corners of the world.
Your request is similar to mine.
I'm not someone who can make changes to pulp, but I worry no one is so I hope I can offer some help.
I mentioned some ideas in the other thread that Laclale linked, but another idea would be to only use uppercase or only use lowercase. a lot of older games do that already and it's never annoyed me as a player. if you did that, you'd free up the other version of the letter for the version of that letter with a diacritic. I know there are a couple letters that have additional variations, but I am pretty sure there are more letters that don't have a variation at all. For example, make shift+e to give you É and shift+f give you Ě. it's a little weird, but it could work for your purposes. you can also repurpose any symbols you aren't going to use.
I don't know Czech very well, but if it's anything like English, tilde and caret are pretty useless characters so you could replace those with extra needed characters. Pulp handles 95 characters so you could totally remove some symbols and find some way to fit the whole Czech alphabet. 42 letters x2 for capitals, minus 5 because you can use c + h for Ch and I've read you basically never use capital Ě, Ů, and Ý, so that puts you at 79 characters. If you want numbers, you'll need to use 89. You'll need a space for sure and that leaves you with 5 spots to put punctuation which really isn't a lot so I'd either remove numbers or one case, but maybe you can get by with just five punctuation?
Also, it is an ABSOLUTE PAIN to deal with using backlash and curly braces in strings so if you use them for things, I would make them the most rare characters.