How to draw special characters in XNA?

Question

I want to draw special characters like: "π,Ω,θ,ξ" in XNA by using method SpriteBatch.DrawString(), but I get an exception saying those characters aren't available in the SpriteFont file. Is there any solution for this?

Answer 1

You need to include those characters in your spritefont.

In your spritefont file, you need to have another "region" for greek letters:

<CharacterRegions>
  <CharacterRegion><!-- Normal letters -->
    <Start>&#32;</Start>
    <End>&#126;</End>
  </CharacterRegion>
  <CharacterRegion><!-- Greek letters -->
    <Start>&#913;</Start>
    <End>&#969;</End>
  </CharacterRegion>
</CharacterRegions>

When you have included that, you should be able to display those characters with that spritefont:

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Using Character Map tool

To find which region these characters are in, use Character Map, a nice application found in All Programs -> Accessories -> System Tools.

When you select a character, it displays it's character code, for example omega (ω) is U+03C9, which is 0x03C9 hexadecimal or 969 decimal.

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Different ways of defining Character Regions

There are 3 ways you can define your regions in SpriteFont file, and they are related to three ways to write characters in XML:

• Decimal representation: i.e. ~ - format is &#nnnn;
• Hexadecimal representation: i.e. ~ - format is &#xnnnn;
• Actual character: i.e. ~

Those are three ways to write the same thing in XML, so you could use different ways to define your regions. Above was the decimal representation of the regions.

Here is the hexadecimal representation, which is the easiest to get from the Character Map:

Finally, you can use the actual characters to define your regions, and you get those by copy pasting them from the text box in Character Map tool: