Multi Commander Support Forum

Multi Commander => Feature Requests and Suggestions => Topic started by: RadarNyan on February 03, 2020, 16:32:48

Title: Choose correct font for file name base on language
Post by: RadarNyan on February 03, 2020, 16:32:48

I know this sounds like a very strange request, please let me explain.

I choose English UI on almost all the applications I use (including Windows OS itself) just so that when I encounter a technical problem it's easier to communicate with the author / easier to find an answer on the internet. However, I do have many files/folders named in Japanese & Chinese which are the two major languages I use on a daily basis.

The problem with this is: there isn't ONE font that can display both Japanese & Chinese correctly at the same time. Well, I blame this on the stupid Han unification (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification). Basically: one character can look different between Japanese and Chinese, and it's the font's job to display the correct form. You can find many example on the wikipedia page of Han unification, for a quick (but not fully correct) understanding: you know how lower case "a" and "g" can look different under different font? Yeah, basically that.

When the Unicode Consortium made the decision to unify characters across Chinese, Japanese and Korean (a.k.a "CJK") they created this chaos that a Japanese text would not look correct under a Chinese environment, vice versa (Korean stopped using hanja long time ago so they didn't get caught up in this mess as much). Most websites today solves this by including a language tag so the browser would choose the correct font for the section tagged.

I understand that this isn't gonna be a feature that many people would need, I'd code it myself but I don't think this is possible with the current Extension / Plugin System (please tell me if I'm wrong) what I think is needed to achieve this feature are:

Create "presets" of fonts for different language, this is easy to do and goes without saying.
Somewhere to store meta-data to determine which language the file is, maybe make use of NTFS Alternate Data Streams? (see: https://github.com/Dijji/FileMeta (https://github.com/Dijji/FileMeta) )

This is no urgent matter by any mean but it would be nice if you can add it when you have free time.

Thanks for reading through this long post :)

Title: Re: Choose correct font for file name base on language
Post by: Mathias (Author) on February 04, 2020, 13:26:28

How to you swap between Chinese and Japanese ?
Go into explorer Panel settings and change the font for the list panel ?