• From: France
  • Registered: 2009-10-16
  • Posts: 4

Topic: Lack of international support

In all the widgets that I have tried, there was no support for characters outside of ASCII-7. Even when the texts used where correct, it was sometime impossible to understand them because of too many holes in them. That is, it is impossible:

  1. to input characters necessary for common languages such as French, Spanish, German, etc;

  2. to have the same characters displayed in the widgets: RSS reader, social widgets (Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed…), corporate widget and so. This is very problematic for all the non-English users.

For us, it would be necessary to have UTF-8 support, so we can read texts with letters such as "é, ê, ñ, À, Œ, ç".

dClauzel's Website

  • Duane
  • Duane
  • Blue Octy
  • Offline
  • From: San Diego, CA
  • Registered: 2006-08-24
  • Posts: 8,209

Re: Lack of international support

The Flash Player in the chumby supports Unicode, and will parse content encoded in UTF-8.

However, since the actual fonts are included in the widgets, it's up to each widget developer to include the necessary character sets.

There are several Japanese widgets that do this already.

Duane's Website

  • From: France
  • Registered: 2009-10-16
  • Posts: 4

Re: Lack of international support

Duane wrote:

The Flash Player in the chumby supports Unicode, and will parse content encoded in UTF-8.

However, since the actual fonts are included in the widgets, it's up to each widget developer to include the necessary character sets.

There are several Japanese widgets that do this already.

Ok, I see.

Is there a way to overwrite the fonts used by a widget, or to raise awareness of this problem to the widgets developers?

dClauzel's Website

  • Duane
  • Duane
  • Blue Octy
  • Offline
  • From: San Diego, CA
  • Registered: 2006-08-24
  • Posts: 8,209

Re: Lack of international support

There's no way to override the fonts used by a widget - they're actually converted by the Flash IDE into a special format and referenced directly.

Your welcome to edit this page on this wiki to bring attention to this issue.

Duane's Website

  • From: France
  • Registered: 2009-10-16
  • Posts: 4

Re: Lack of international support

Duane wrote:

Your welcome to edit this page on this wiki to bring attention to this issue.

Done : http://wiki.chumby.com/mediawiki/index. … al_support

dClauzel's Website

  • Registered: 2010-07-16
  • Posts: 4

Re: Lack of international support

Duane wrote:

The Flash Player in the chumby supports Unicode, and will parse content encoded in UTF-8.

However, since the actual fonts are included in the widgets, it's up to each widget developer to include the necessary character sets.

There are several Japanese widgets that do this already.


I recently developed a widget with Openlaszlo. I faced the issue with the missing characters. I spent almost two hours trying to fix it. I finally had to include a font that supports UTF-8 in the widget itself. It looks like that the default font of chumby_flashplayer doesn't support non-ascii characters. And I didn't find any other way to make it work.