Re: [Enigma-devel] Russian Localization

[Tacvek]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Daniel Heck" <address@hidden>
To: "Ronald Lamprecht" <address@hidden>
Cc: "Tacvek" <address@hidden>; "Дремук Сергей" 
<address@hidden>; <address@hidden>
Sent: Tuesday, July 04, 2006 3:45 AM
Subject: Re: [Enigma-devel] Russian Localization


> Ronald Lamprecht wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > Tacvek wrote:
> > > > Ronald Lamprecht wrote:
> > > >
> > > > > @Daniel: AFAIK our current font does not support cyrillic characters.
> > > > > How should we support them?
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > Frankly, I don't know... Are there any any free cyrillic truetype fonts
> > > > that we could distribute with Enigma? A quick google search did not 
> > > > turn
> > > > up anything.
> >
> > There are several sources for cyrillic ttf fonts:
> >
> > http://www.freelang.net/fonts/index.html
> > http://babel.uoregon.edu/yamada/fonts/russian.html
> >
> > As a first experiment I took
> > http://www.freelang.com/download/fonts/ttf_russe_kurierkoi8.zip as it
> > has a licence that allows to modify the font. Thus I copied the cyrillic
> > characters to dustismo_bold.ttf and added the corresponding unicode
> > mappings.
>
> Unfortunately the license of ttf_russe_kurierkoi8.zip is incompatible
> with that of the Dustismo font.  Although the former does permit
> modification, it explicitly disallows selling the font and therefore
> conflicts with the GPL used by Dustismo.
>
> > > There is a GPL'ed font called ttf-thyromanes that can be found in
> > > debian, and it includes cyrillic (in addition to latin, greek, and IPA).
> > >
> > > The font has no hinting or kerning, which is a downside especially for
> > > small font sizes.
>
> The original Dustismo font also had no good hinting, but one run through
> Fontforge's autohinting improved the visual appearance of the font
> inside Enigma tremendously.  So I don't see this as a major problem.
> Same for the missing kerning information; Dustismo, for example, only
> has a handful of kerning pairs and still looks quite good.

Was fontforge also responsible for the noticable decrease in file size 
versus the original Dustimo font?


Annother suggestion:
Perhaps the DejaVu fonts, specifically DejaVu Sans. DejaVu is an extended 
version of Bitstream Vera, so it should fit in well with Enigma.

They have more or less the same licence as Bistream Vera.

The font covers over 100 languages,
with full Latin, Greek, and cyrillic, (A few combining diacritics from latin 
are missing, but alsmost any one that would actually be used is there), and 
some other areas, including the full braille section, and many of the symbol 
sections.)
In other words it should support any language that uses Latin, Cyrillic, or 
Greek characters, and perhaps a couple of other languages as well, and has 
plenty of symbols.

Indeed the only reasons not to use this font seem to be:
1. No support for most east asian languages,
2. Licence not GPL-compatible (but it is free, and DFSG-free, and being 
data, it does not need compatability
with the main program).
3. Quite a bit larger than Vera Sans. vera_sans.ttf is 38 KB, and 
DejaVuSans.ttf is 450 KB. (However, that is not horribly much compared to 
the total size of Enigma.)
4. The character sizes in Vera/Dejavu are somewhat larger than with 
Dustismo.