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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 13:29:43 +0100

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

I mean that you can render the font bitmap in its native size to a
32bit surface and use the bilinear scaling feature to resize that, for
example. The advantage of on-the-fly scaling is that you really need
only a single font, the differently sized glyphs are created as
needed. The disadvantage over native fonts of different sizes is, of
course, lower quality.

If you render the glyph to a differently sized bitmap with some
nearest-fit algorithm (because there isn't really any option here) the
result would be vastly inferior I would expect. As fonts are bitmaps
this is the only option for scaling in grub-mkfont.

> 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

That doesn't really help. There isn't really a canonical reading every
Chinese speaking person is supposed to understand, and even if you
choose one as the standard it's not possible to derive the meaning of
a word from the reading but it is possible from the Chinese character.

Hebrew and Arabic use letters that correspond to consonants so anybody
who knows the language and Latin alphabet should be able to read a
Latin transcription, though possibly with gritting teeth.

> 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.

Yes, that's certainly a possibility but one has to be aware of this
limitation and perhaps mention it somewhere.

Thanks

Michal




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