SynthEyes Gets Global

SynthEyes 2106 now offers tooltips and optionally, menus, script names, and user interface elements, in 25 languages. It also supports international Unicode UTF‐8 characters in file, tracker, camera, mesh, etc names, and notes and file descriptions.

Script for Search Engines:

Hi, this is Russ Andersson. Today, roughly 60% of SynthEyes customers live outside the US, in about 100 countries worldwide. Something like 35-40% live in countries where the primary language is not English. Yet SynthEyes has supported only a basic 96-character ASCII character set. SynthEyes 2106 breaks that barrier, with Unicode support throughout the program on Windows, macOS, and Linux. We'd been waiting for Windows to nicely support UTF-8 to make Unicode practical in SynthEyes, and that happened fairly recently. You can now use the full international character set for file and path names, which has been a pain point for customers. You can also use them for the names of trackers, cameras, meshes etc, and for Notes and File Descriptions. And we have a really cool feature to help customers with limited skills in English: translated tooltips, those helpful boxes that pop up when you hover your mouse over something. They're a great source of information throughout SynthEyes, and now they come in 25 different languages! And if you like, SynthEyes can translate additional parts of the user interface. There are a lot of nice details to this, so let's get started. When you first start SynthEyes 2106, you'll now see a language selection panel. We already have French selected for this tutorial. SynthEyes will try to guess what non-English language might be relevant to you. If you want to stick with English, just select that and click OK. Or, pick whichever language you like. Don't worry, you can change it later, but in a minute you'll see why you probably won't want to. You'll notice there are also options to translate your menu items, script names, and much of the user interface. You can decide whether you'd rather have translations or the original English. They are machine translations, so they may not always be great. Staying with English will make it easier to compare to the manual and tutorials. You can decide what works best for you. So here we go. You can see we have full Unicode filenames on the splash screen. Overall, it doesn't look much different... until you hover over something, and you see the translated tooltip. If it doesn't make sense, or you want to see the original English, just hold down the shift or control key, and you can see the original text. It's the best of both worlds for tooltips. We can look at some menus, and there's the translation. You'll see that dynamically-created items aren't translated. If you look at script names, they aren't translated, but you can have those translated if you want. Let's see how we enable that. Open the Preferences and here are the controls, where they are easy to find. You can change the "Translate script names" setting here. It's not too practical to translate the main user interface to French, because the translations are typically longer than the equivalent English, and therefore often don't fit. Changes to the language settings take effect only when SynthEyes starts. We do have translations of the tooltips for the scripts, even if you aren't translating the names of the scripts. Translations are machine-generated, so apologies in advance for any that are incorrect, misleading, comic, offensive, etc. You can see here that Plane has been translated to Avion, an aircraft, instead of a geometric plane. If you bring them to our attention, we can try to correct the worst translations, though we're not able to do extensive hand corrections. Let's take a look at some names now. We can change some tracker names to other languages. They are displayed nicely in the control panels and dialogs, but if we need to display in an OpenGL view such as the Perspective view or Graph Editor, or even more views on macOS, it gets a bit trickier. The OpenGL views render their own text, for speed and simplicity, and they don't have a full million-character font. Instead it uses a Western-European font. If necessary, an OpenGL view will remove accents and separate characters to get to *something* it can draw, which works for some Eastern European characters and languages. For other languages such as Greek and Asian languages, no graphic is available, and characters are drawn as a bullet. It's a good idea to keep the Tracker123 part, and just add a description after it that might get bulletted. SynthEyes does have a solution, custom OpenGL fonts, for languages that require only about 140 to 150 additional characters. So far, we've produced that only for Hiragana. I'll restart SynthEyes into Japanese; now the Hiragana character set is the automatic choice. It would be possible for Greek and limited Cyrillic characters as well, if there is significant interest. If you're really motivated, they are add-ons, so you might even try it yourself; ask for details. If you are using descriptive non-ASCII names, you should take into account the capabilities of the software you export to, as that software, or its scripting language, may not support international UTF-8 characters. For example, Blender's support seems limited. Be sure to test that before you go too crazy. If you see issues with particular applications, and know that they have full Unicode support, let us know. The international support within SynthEyes should pretty much "just work" for most things. If not, let us know. There are details concerning the initial conversion of your preferences and older scenes when you first start using SynthEyes 2106, so see the "Global, Not Just English" section of the manual for details about how older files are handled. We think the tooltip translation should be quite helpful. Let us know! If you're interested in seeing translations in additional languages, let us know that too. Hope this capability helps and thanks for watching!