Outputting unicode characters in windows terminal

Question

Over the past week I've been working on a roguelike game in C++ along with a friend. Mostly too learn the language.

I'm using:

• pdcurses
• Windows 7
• Visual studio C++

To output wchar_t's wherever I want to in the console. I have succeeded in otuputting some unicode characters such as \u263B (☻), but others such as \u2638 (☸) will just end up as question marks(?).

Here's the relevant code I use for output.

// Container of room information

struct RoomInfo
{
    wchar_t * layout;
    int width;
    int height;
};

// The following function builds RoomInfo 

RoomInfo Room::examine(IActor * examinor)
{
    RoomInfo ri;
    ri.width = this->width;
    ri.height = this->height;
    ri.layout = new wchar_t[height * width];
    for(unsigned int y = 0; y < height; y++)
    {
        for(unsigned int x = 0; x < width; x++)
        {
            ri.layout[y*width + x] = L'\u263B'; // works
            //ri.layout[y*width + x] = L'\u2638'; // will not work
        }
    }
}

// The following function outputs RoomInfo

void CursesConsole::printRoom(RoomInfo room)
{
    int w = room.width;
    int h = room.height;

    WINDOW * mapw = newwin(h, w, 1, 0);
    for(int y = 0; y < h; y++)
    {
        wmove(mapw, y, 0);
        for(int x = 0; x < w; x++)
        {
            int c = y*w + x;
            waddch(mapw, room.layout[c]);
        }
    }

    wrefresh(mapw);
    delwin(mapw);
}

I could of course fall back on boring ANSI-characters. But it would be really awesome to have the complete unicode-set of characters to play with.

To sum it up: How do you make sure that unicode characters are outputted correctly?

---

Edit:

Ok, so I figured out my encoding is working correctly. The problem is that I need to force the terminal to switch to a more unicode-rich font face. Is there a cross-platform way to do this? is there even a windows specific way to do this?

Answer 1

The problem is that I need to force the terminal to switch to a more unicode-rich font face. Is there a cross-platform way to do this? is there even a windows specific way to do this?

I had a look for this, but couldn't find a Windows API call to do it (which may just mean I didn't find it, of course). I would not expect to find a cross-platform way to do it.

The best solution I can think of is to launch the console using a specially constructed Shell Link (.LNK) file. If you read the file format documentation, you'll see that it allows you to specify a font.

But your problems don't end there. A Western locale install of Windows provides Lucida Console, but that font only provides a limited subset of graphemes. I assume that you can output/input Japanese text in the console on a Japanese Windows PC. You'd need to check what is available on a Japanese Windows if you wanted to be sure it would work there.

Linux (Ubuntu, at least) seems to have much better support here, using UTF-8 and providing a font with broad grapheme support. I haven't checked other distros to see what the story is there, nor have I checked how fonts are resolved in the terminal (whether it's an X thing, a Gnome thing or whatever).