string class enhancements

[Boogiwoogie]

hi!
i have seen in the roadmap that you plan to rewrite parts of the unicode and string classes for e.g. outlined text. if you do so anyway, you may consider some more changes - this is not a real feature request, just something to think about.

first of all, if you have unicode support all over the place, it may be useful to have the possibility to display strings in other directions than from left to right. that can help on i18n or making a label for vertical sliders/progress bars.

secondly, i have seen in a couple of games (namely quake3, warcraft3, trackmania nations) that they support colored names. color information are kept within the text by leading control symbols. besides colored names, it can also help making a single letter of a button highlighted (e.g. for the shortcut key that has same function as clicking on the button). its pretty hard to do that manually, the button text hast to be splitted up and drawn in parts one after another (or did i miss something out?).

however, as said above, smfl can very well do without those two changes - they are hardly worth mentioning (especially because both are kinda gui-related).

boogie :shock:

[Laurent]

The orientation option might be interesting for the future (i.e. after the 2.0 rewrite).

Regarding the color stuff (which can be extended to rich text actually), it's a little bit out of scope for SFML, an even if it's slightly less optimized if done externally, you can still do it pretty easily.
Actually, a RichText class would be great to have on the wiki

Thanks for your feedback

[panithadrum]

I'm actually making a sf::RTString =)