drawing a unicode character to TCanvas (Windows 7)
lazarus / 31-LCL

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Malachias69 · 2013-04-25 22:35

Hello,

I am trying to  canvas.TextOut (...)  an unicode character
representing a chess piece in my TPaintBox.

After reading this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_symbols_in_Unicode
... it should be possible to draw a white king using it's hex code:
$2654.

But all i got on screen where question marks instead.

I think I tried every piece of code the internet has to offer on
unicode with Lazarus by now without success.
I hope somebody here can tell me if and how it's done.

Is TCanvas capable of drawing those special unicode characters?

Thanks in front!

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Blaazen · 2013-04-25 22:49

It works here (Linux+Qt4):
Code: [Select]procedure TForm1.PaintBox1Paint(Sender: TObject);
begin
  Canvas.Font.Size:=24;
  Canvas.TextOut(20, 20, #$2654);
end;Compiler says: unit1.pas(35,32) Warning: Unicode constant cast
with potential data loss
but see screenshot  .

EDIT: It should be:
Code: [Select]procedure TForm1.PaintBox1Paint(Sender: TObject);
begin
  PaintBox1.Canvas.Font.Size:=24;
  PaintBox1.Canvas.TextOut(20, 20, #$2654);
end;But both work well. With GTK2 too.

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Malachias69 · 2013-04-25 23:06

Hi Blaazen,

thanks for the quick answer!
It didn't work on windows 7 though.

I also checked the font I used - Arial -  and found out, that these
chess characters are not available there ... so I tried codes for
several other characters that were available in Arial, but got the
same question marks.

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Blaazen · 2013-04-25 23:17

My font is Liberation or DejaVu. I have no Windows installed to test.

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Malachias69 · 2013-04-25 23:23

After some searching I found out that the windows 7 system font
"Meiryo UI" has the chess pieces as described in the wikipedia
article. Still not showing up in my canvas though ...

Is it possible, that my Lazarus version is outdated?  I currently use
version 1.0.2 from 2012-10-09 with FPC 2.6.0, win32.