Support unicode symbols / fonts

[Juyas]

Describe the issue

I am using SymbolChat additionally to Scribble, since I switched from Stendhal (since Stendhal broke a lot for me), but I am still trying have unicode symbols for nice designs and cool covers in a roleplay setting.

Since the 2.0.0-beta, which is no longer using mixins according to the changelog, the mixin-integration of SymbolChat broke and made it highly uncomfortable to use.
I wonder if it is possible to add support to this kind of mods OR add a unicode feature yourself - it's hard to tell actually, which direction would take more effort.
I noticed there is a feature to open the book-UI as "vanilla" which also does not solve this issue.

Before (look at the top right):

After:

• top right is empty now & I have to copy the unicode via the chat, since this menu exists there as well.

Minecraft Version

1.21.11

Scribble Version

2.0.0-beta1+mc1.21.11-fabric

Mod Loader

Fabric / Quilt

[chrrs]

This is intentional-ish. Its an unfortunate change that comes with the change of approach in 2.0, basically trading one set of mod incompatibilities for another. I do agree though that there really should be a way to input unicode characters, be that integration with Symbol Chat somehow or add it to Scribble itself. I'll see what I can do!

[Juyas]

I will happily await your success no matter how it turns out in the end :D

[J4PC]

@chrrs You mentioned the other day that you were still unsure about how to implement the unicode fonts without cluttering the UI (#120 ). I don't know if my take on this helps, but I wanted to share a suggestion - even if a bit bold - in case there is a worthwhile idea somewhere in there.

Maybe an obvious start but Word has, in my opinion, a really good baseline when it comes to UI for text editing.

So maybe there could be something similar in Scribble - to illustrate I made a quick and, to state the obvious, ugly mockup:

A few notes:

• The main thing here of course being the font selection.So this would mean finally not having to use external Unicode font sites where you never know for sure until you try it how the font would turn out in-game. (Example fonts that would be great to have: 𝙼𝚘𝚗𝚘𝚜𝚙𝚊𝚌𝚎 or ꜱᴍᴀʟʟ ᴄᴀᴘꜱ or ₛᵤ₆ₛ꜀ᵣᵢₚₜ, to name just a few.)
• For a long time I wanted to suggest text alignment as a feature, because in many books I needed to align text manually in the middle or right, but I always thought if it would be added in the current design it would clutter it completely. But with a potential redesign maybe it could be possible.
• I also added a copy formatting pen in the mockup, because now with font in addition colour, and styling of text it would be helpful to copy just the formatting.
• The separate paste button with the little arrow down below would also help all the people that don't know that Shift disables the formatting.
• And lastly, because why not - it is a mockup and I can dream a bit - I added a search feature in the top right corner. [FEATURE] Add Go To and Find fucntions #55

I know my mockup looks quite ugly and I can perfectly understand if this is not a direction you want to go in, but maybe it can help inspire the real implementation in some way.

[chrrs]

Thanks for the suggestion! I definitely still need to think about this a bit more. I've always been operating on the note that most of the time, Scribble's functions actually won't be used (because most of the time, you just want to write something in a book), so I want to keep its widgets out of the way as much as possible. A full-fledged word-style editor is not really the direction I want to go in, though there's definitely things I can steal from it :). I do really like Scribbles current UI, but the features are kind of outgrowing it at this pace. We'll see!

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I wonder if it might be an idea to add a mode where formatting options show when selecting text? Of course toggleable, but combined with this, and not making it too bulky / using textures that fit in, this might actually not be a bad idea!