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Re: fonts for gfxmenu, help needed


From: Michal Suchanek
Subject: Re: fonts for gfxmenu, help needed
Date: Wed, 25 Nov 2009 10:01:43 +0100

2009/11/25 Robert Millan <address@hidden>:
> On Tue, Nov 24, 2009 at 08:43:30PM +0100, Vladimir 'φ-coder/phcoder' 
> Serbinenko wrote:
>> I identified number of fonts as one of the reason of gfxmenu needing
>> important amount of time to load. I prefer to have few nice looking free
>> fonts with reasonable unicode coverage (we'll need it because of
>> gettext) and load only ones really needed
>> [...]
>> > 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
>> I'm ok wth doing any kind of preprocessing in grub-mkfont but grub2 has
>> to remain simple in order to ensure reasonable performance even on slow
>> system (curren't it's not the case and more work is needed for
>> optimising it)
>
> I understand there's a lot of room for improvement, but it'd be interesting to
> start providing a basic set of fonts so that we get the ball rolling and
> theme authors can beging doing their artist work.
>
> Has someone obtained a working multi-size setup with grub-mkfont + unifont?
> Currently I just know that the default ascii.pf2 works (but doesn't have any
> single-size theme that would play well with it).
>

As I said that's pretty much impossible.

unifont.ttf is just the bitmap squares recorded as outline, and even
if you generate multiple sizes of bitmaps from that (and most of these
are bound to be ugly bordering on useless) you still get only a single
face which would not be acceptable for most theme authors.

I would suggest looking at the bitmap fonts which used to be installed
with X. They provide bitmaps in multiple sizes for multiple languages
although the unicode coverage is much poorer than with unifont.

Other thing we might try is scaling the font in grub itself. This is
poor typography because proper scalable fonts are adjusted for
different sizes, the outlines aren't simply scaled.

However, grub has decent scaling that can be applied to images so it
can be applied to fonts to get things started. Then we need 2-3 type
faces in a single size which is probably much easier to get.

Note that with truetype fonts most fonts (besides the crappy
English-only fonts) specialize on a family of languages that use the
same writing system and the glyphs for other writing systems tend to
be poorly drawn or non-existent.

This is understandable as no font author can possibly know how the
glyphs for all the various languages fit together. This also means
that

 - you typically have to install fonts specifically for language(s)
you intend to use

 - glyph fallback is integral part of any decent font system. Some try
to determine the nearest matching font automatically with varying
success, in some systems you can specify different fonts for different
unicode ranges (which are then scaled to fit together).

 - there is a problem with Simplified Chinese/Traditional
Chinese/Japanese. Some of the glyphs used by these writing systems
have the same unicode codepoint but are slightly different in each. To
get these rendered correctly you need special font for each. Blame the
Unicode people.

Thanks

Michal




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