First off, I applaud Decker’s goal of a small, effective code base and I’m totally fine with how it works. I absolutely adore it!
I’m just curious though if Extended ASCII has been considered.
If it’s viable, perhaps the native Decker fonts don’t support it, but import a font with a special “Extended ASCII” property and maybe Decker can apply the character codes from 128 to 255 to that specific font’s rendering. This would support most of Western Europe. UTF-8 wouldn’t be needed.
However, Extended ASCII is 8-bit versus regular ASCII being 7-bit. I have no idea how Decker deals with font characters internally, but I know that Decker renders characters beyond 127 to a question mark so it deals with Extended ASCII at some level. This also means that Extended ASCII would have to be accepted in string values in Decker’s scripting language.
I apologize if Extended ASCII has already been addressed.
Antics, I know it’s not ideal, but you could make your own font that is all uppercase letters that works with accented characters. For example, type in lowercase and the normal Latin uppercase characters are rendered; use capital letters to render accented letters. If you’re versed with programming outside of Decker, you could write a script to convert normal strings of text into your custom font compliant strings. As long as you don’t need more than 26 accented character variations, it’d work (you could use other keyboard character as well). All caps isn’t bad to read on screen for games like RPGs and such, though it might not be good for visual novel games with large amounts of text.
It’s something to consider, at least.