Japanese with SDL?

[JCool451]

I know I could just make one GIANT bitmap font for Japanese, but I don't know of any other way. Is there a simpler and more efficient way?A person told me that pango is used for foreign text, but I'm not sure if that will work with SDL.

If nobody responds, then I'm just going to go for the bitmap font approach, but I'll be using only the kana. (For obvious space saving reasons.)

Note: I searched for this on the forums and on google with no results. I know of only one person that knows how to do it, but his code is closed source. :(

[JCool451]

If it makes any difference, I'm talking about displaying Japanese, not inputting it.

[dboyer]

eh... ive just started playing SDL myself...

but with the proper font, it seems like you should just be able to call the characters... I know that under windows, i just had a japanese font i could type in (although there was a lot more overhead for converting input)... perhaps there is a font package for linux or something? i know that when i hit a japanese website, it shows up as unicode numbers... ive always assumed you just need the font package

[JCool451]

Right you are! I recently found out that one can display japanese fonts with SDL_ttf, but I haven't been able to find any resources on this. I'll just play around with it for a little while and when I find the answer I'll post something up in the "How I did it" section. (The first time I'll actually be doing something useful in this forum)

SDL_ttf apparently supports 2-byte unicode fonts, so I should be OK.