Font with utf-8 arrow glyphs?

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1

Hey,

I'm trying to render the text A↓Z, but I'm getting A☐Z.
Is there a PD font with these glyphs supported ?

2

No, you'll need to create your own.

You might get away with creating only the new characters, not specifying a replacement character in your font, and relying on pass-through to the system font for all characters not in your font (everything bar your defined characters).

See https://sdk.play.date/inside-playdate/#_supported_characters

1 Like
3

Are you trying to show "d-pad down" or a literal down-arrow? FWIW there are (optional) standard conventions for characters to use for d-pad, buttons, crank, etc.

🎣	Crank
✛	D-pad
⬆	D-pad up
➡	D-pad right
⬇	D-pad down
⬅	D-pad left
Ⓐ	A button
Ⓑ	B button
⊙	System menu button
🔒	Lock button
🟨	Playdate

(There are multiple down-arrow characters, so plenty for both!)

To add a character to a font in Caps, if it's not already in one of the category grids, I think you're supposed to be able to just paste/type it into the Preview box. In Glyph mode, clicking a character in the Preview box should select it for editing... creating it if necessary... I thought?

But that seems to be undocumented, and when I try it now, clicking characters in the Preview box does nothing? (Regardless of whether it's in "active typing" mode, and whether the character exists yet or not.) Am I misremembering?

4

It was a utf-8 down.

5

This is correct!

It's documented here: https://play.date/caps/docs/ There's a link to this document in the left sidebar of Caps.

Hm, it seems to work for me:

image
image1864×1282 231 KB

When I click the "mission Unicode character" diamonds in the Preview image, the arrow glyph is selected in the editor above. (Two arrows are shown in the Preview because… Unicode :slightly_smiling_face:)

If this doesn't work for you, can you

  1. try another font,
  2. see if there are any errors in the console after you click on the Preview,
  3. let us know what browser you're using so we can try reproducing on our end.

Thanks!

2 Likes
6

Got it! I had been clicking in the Preview typing box, not the result box on the right—because Caps remembered a long-ago choice of black background, and thus that result box appeared empty (which, since I was working on a new, empty, font, seemed right to me). Switching to white background revealed the <?> placeholders, which ARE clickable.

(Not sure why my search on the word "click" came up empty in the docs... it doesn't come up empty now! Thanks for refreshing my memory.)