has anyone succesfully printed a fancy double-byte character to the screen before, using BlitzMax?
I'm not too familiar with Arabic, but using a slightly modified version of your code (using msgothic.ttf rather than cour.ttf and looping "0 to 2" to go left-to-right rather than right-to-left with "6 to 0 step -1") I was able to print "DefData $30e4, $30de, $30c8" correctly as "Yamato" in katakana:
So, your approach works just fine with double-byte unicode Japanese. And thanks for posting it, since this is the first that I've seen that works in BlitzMax.
Arabic is indeed being printed - but all the characters are in the final form!
Looking at Charmap, it seems that the initial and medial forms are also available (just with higher unicode values than in your test above):
(sorry if the formatting is smashed; first time poster to the forums)
Welcome aboard, Neil! You can use (code)(/code) or (codebox)(/codebox) around your code to preserve it (replacing the "()" with "[]"). More formatting goodness is at: What are the forum codes?
Wendell