New user - a few questions

[brianelmegaard]

Hi

I and my daughter just started working with Alice and we are impressed about what you can do with it.

We have run into a few questions:
1: How can you make a text like "To be continued" show up without something saying it?
2: How can text bubbles include national characters like æøå. They are changed to something strange when entered?
3: I just tried the export as web page. It works, but text bubbles don't show. Why?

Regards,
Brian

[Shadow Sovereign]

I would like to welcome you to our community here on the forums, for one. And two, I only know the answer to your first question. I would try a 3D Text object and place it where necessary. As for the other two, I don't much know about international symbols and I've never used the Export option.

Anyways, I hope I helped! :D

[DrJim]

A little more on your questions.

In addition to the 3D text option, you can also have an object say something and then set “is Showing” for the object to false.

As far as getting non-English characters, the only way I’ve found is pretty much trial and error. If you know a True-Type font with the characters and know the mapping to the standard keyboard characters – that should work.

Personally I’ve never figured out the "foreign character" and other non-standard keyboard mappings – maybe someone else can cover that or you can post your results if you have good success :)

Just pulling down the “more” menu for a font in the say command won’t give you a list of the available fonts - but if you add a 3D text object, its list of properties will include the current font and a pull-down list for the other fonts available.

If the font is not defined for all characters or has some other strange characteristics, Alice will hang up and you will have to kill it with Task Manager. This usually only happens for really crazy fonts – even some moderately strange ones have worked for me, as the attached image shows. (The text bubble is from a cone with “isShowing”=false.)

The bug list on the Alice main page has a list of the many problems with the “export as web page option” – including the fact there are no text bubbles and that sound often doesn’t work. There is also a file size limit which is not well defined but pretty small. Personally, I’ve totally given up trying to use that option. :mad:

Hope this helps.