Über display in Team Fortress 2

Question

I'm using Chinese software and I changed system locale Language for non-Unicode programs in Region and Language (Win7x64, Control Panel) from English-US to Chinese (Simplified PRC).

While I'm playing TF2, the Ü is replaced with a question mark. So all I can see is ?berCharge ?berectomy, and ?bersaw.

To workaround this, I tried opening
C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Team Fortress 2\tf\resource\tf_english.txt.

It's encoded in UCS2-Little Endian, so I tried to convert it to ANSI, UTF8... but failed.

I ended up replacing all Ü characters with U in the text file...

Is there a better work-around?

Answer 1

Years later I'm picking up TF2 again, and this time I'm looking into the modding community, too. With all the customization HUDs, I think I got the answer now:

TF2 does not render the Verdana font correctly, somehow, on Windows. Changing Verdana to some other font, say, TF2 Secondary, will fix it.

I used the GCFScape software to unpack Team Fortress 2\tf\tf2_misc_dir.vpk, and extracted the folders resource and scripts into Team Fortress 2\tf\custom\hud. Then I opened Team Fortress 2\tf\custom\hud\resource\clientscheme.res with a text editor, and searched and replaced 'Verdana' with 'TF2 Secondary', issues gone.

Although in the original configuration,

"Default"
{
    "1"
    {
    "name"      "Verdana"
    "tall"      "12"
    "weight"    "900"
    "range"     "0x0000 0x017F" //  Basic Latin, Latin-1 Supplement, Latin Extended-A
    "yres"  "480 599"
    }
...

the range 0x017F should be able to cover the letter Ü (0x00DC). But it just doesn't work with Verdana and the current TF2 build 9089314.

Answer 2

This seems to be a problem with a corrupt file for the uber letter U. Its possible that they will fix this bug eventually but one thing id recomend you try is just reinstall tf2. This will give you clean, uncorrupt, current files of the game and should fix the problem. This can be acheived by right clicking the game in your library and clicking: delete local content. After this you can re install the game from the steam store. I know its time consuming and annoying but the first solution to any minor bug or corrupt file is a clean reinstallation.