Re: fonts for gfxmenu, help needed

[Michal Suchanek]

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).
>

Does grub-mkfont support writing .pf2 files from any font?

IIRC there was a glyph searching optimization committed into Grub
which uses binary search instead of linear search.
This requires either that font glyphs are sorted by Unicode codepoint
(which they supposedly are in unifont) or that grub-mkfont sorts them
while creating the .pf2 file.

Thanks

Michal