Re: [Enigma-devel] Russian Localization

[Raoul]

Tacvek wrote:
>
> ----- 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.
I tested the DejaVu Sans fonts today. While the DejaVuSans is to bright,
to white, the DejaVuSansExtraLight ist too thin.
The DejaVuSansCondensed looks very nice for me.

But I do not undestand very much of font issues.