Invalid text characters
These characters are characters we should not use because Unreal and the font we use in Conan does not support them correctly. The table below shows what to replace them with if you find them. Typically, these characters are inserted into text because the text was written in Word.
NOTE: A lot of these look the same, so I also created a screendump from Notepad, so the difference is more easily seen.
|
|
Looks like |
Use this instead |
|---|---|---|
|
Quotes |
‘ and ’ |
' |
|
Double Quotes |
“ and ” |
" |
|
Em/En-Dashes |
– and – |
- |
|
Triple . |
… |
... |
Copy-pasting from Word/Excel to Unreal
Word
In some cases, you might need to copy-paste text from word or excel into a text in Unreal. There are some pitfalls here to be aware of.
First - the area where you PASTE text that has been formatted needs to be the variable tag, not inside the variable itself; as demonstrated in the image below:
Linebreaks will not transfer correctly if you paste it in the variable itself.
Excel
I recommend using Notepad instead of Excel for copy-pasting text for reasons detailed below.
As with copying from Word to Unreal, Excel has some peculiarities. The same rule applies where you need to paste the text onto the text tag itself, rather than inside the text field, but Excel has an additional problem with pasting text in this fashion, which is that - unless you’re using multiple cells for a single entry - it will include double quotation marks around the text - see results below.
So, how do you get away from this? You can’t. The best method is to copy the text to an intermediary format first, like Notepad or Notepad++
Rich Text Formatting
We primarily use this for tables like the Item-table and Journey-steps, but it’s good to know about it. It’s possible to format text using Rich Text formatting, such as this:
This is a new <span color="#33FF2AFF" size="34">rich text block</> that is styled <span style="italic">completely inline</> using <span style="bold"><span></> tags.
We specifically use the ITALIC formatting for quotes in lore and item texts. The formatting needs to be contained in the text block in Excel/Word/Notepad if pasting the text in, like so:
IMPORTANT NOTE
A major problem with text formatting are texts that contain multiple speech-quotes. Let’s have a look at an image to demonstrate this.
Here we have a text with multiple speech quotes and as you can see, it completely warps the formatting and even removes the SPAN formatting. This is not caused by the quotes, it’s caused by the linebreaks, and there’s no way around this, except for individually wrapping each line with the SPAN formatting, like this:
<span style="italic">'Hello!' said Conan in a manly muscular way.</>
<span style="italic">'Hello indeed!' responded Thulsa Doom, while sipping on his tea</>
<span style="italic">'Now die like a pig!' he then yelled because reasons.</>