Re: fonts for gfxmenu, help needed

[Colin D Bennett]

On Tue, 24 Nov 2009 18:35:55 +0100
Robert Millan <address@hidden> wrote:

> On Tue, Nov 24, 2009 at 04:27:13PM +0100, Michal Suchanek wrote:
> > 
> > I suspect what you are asking is impossible.
> > 
> > As far as I understand unifont is a single bitmap font in a single
> > pixel size and the tarball you sent contains multiple font faces in
> > multiple sizes.
> 
> Any idea how were those fonts built, then?

I just took a bunch of fonts from my Gentoo Linux system and converted
them.  It is just a quick demonstration of how many types, sizes, and
styles of fonts can be used (e.g., small to huge; sans-serif,
monospaced, and serif; italic and normal; etc.).

> Why would I want to convert those fonts?  My goal is figuring out how
> to provide suitable font files out of the usual selection of free
> fonts that is provided by distributors.  So far I only know of
> unifont in this selection, but there's certainly more.  Can you help?

I think that true bitmap fonts will look much, much better than
converted outline fonts, but perhaps if we added an 8-bit alpha channel
to the font format and grub-mkfont could do anti-aliasing during the
conversion process; then I think we could make use of all the free
outline fonts (the Liberation font series?  I know there must be a
number of free fonts we can use.  Most won't support full Unicode
though, but by using font fallback we can search for glyphs missing
from the primary font in some language-specific fallback fonts).

Regards,
Colin

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