Re: fonts for gfxmenu, help needed

[Vladimir 'φ-coder/phcoder' Serbinenko]

Michal Suchanek wrote:
>
> 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.
>
>   
What do you mean by blending? Do you mean pixels with alpha channels?
>> 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?
>   
I haven't checked. But I suppose it doesn't since it stores one
codepoint per on-screen place
> Either way the four points above are things that gfxterm simply does
> not support 
It may need a major changes to support :( And these changes may
propagate through whole terminal system (gotoxy concept is flawed)
> whereas Unihan flamewars are inherent feature of Unicode
>   
You seem have missed variant selectors
(last paragraph of
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unihan#Graphemes_versus_glyphs)
And we're back to multichar per on-screen place problem
> 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.
>   
pinyin. I know it's disagreable to read for native speakers, but it's
similar for Arabic.
In worst case we can just say Japanese people to install Japanese fonts
only and bear with Chinese having a bit wrong rendering and vice-versa.
> Thanks
>
> Michal
>
>
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>   


-- 
Regards
Vladimir 'φ-coder/phcoder' Serbinenko

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