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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 12:12:18 +0100

2009/11/25 Vladimir 'φ-coder/phcoder' Serbinenko <address@hidden>:
> Michal Suchanek wrote:

>>
>> 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.
>>
> Your statements are contradictory. First you say that scaling is bad and
> shouldn't be used in grub-mkfont but then you tell to use the same
> approach in grub.

The difference is that the font is only a bitmap whereas scaling
inside grub can do blending which should give much better results than
scaling bitmap into another bitmap.

> The best way to choose between pre-scaling and scaling in grub is
> benchmarking. Multiple fonts take longer to load but scaling even with
> caching is likely to cause more performance hit.
> How much fonts does an author need? We need either decrease number of
> fonts simultaneously used or have faster font loader (both in preference).
> As Robert said most important is to get things going and theme creators
> can use other free fonts as well

Typically people want at the very least

 - serif font
 - sans-serif font
 - multiple sizes of the above so that the menu can have a larger
title / be scaled to different screen sizes

Sure, some would want their exact font in which the logo of their
distribution is writen but this is outside of scope of Grub.

>>  - 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.
>>
>>
> Let's not get into Unihan flamewar. There are other problems with other
> languages which are more serious. Here are few of them:
> 1) combining diacritics.
> 2) ligatures. Important for indic languages
> 3) context variants. Important for Arabic writing system.
> 4) bidi. Important for Hebrew and Arabic writing system.
>
> Generally current gfxterm is pretty much unsuited for any of these 4
> problems. And gotoxy is pretty ambiguous in bidi context
> Few useful links:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Multilingual_support
> http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia:Unicode/Test/arabe
>

Not being able to use combining diacritics sucks. Does that mean that
grub won't be able to draw decomposed Unicode strings?

Either way the four points above are things that gfxterm simply does
not support whereas Unihan flamewars are inherent feature of Unicode
and the gfxterm technically should be able to display CJK languages
given a good enough font.

Also if worse comes to worst Indic, Arabic or Hebrew can be feasibly
written in Latin, Chinese cannot.

Thanks

Michal




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