Re: fonts for gfxmenu, help needed

[Vladimir 'φ-coder/phcoder' Serbinenko]

Michal Suchanek wrote:
> 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. 
It's equivalent to have partially transparent pixels
> 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.
>   
I still don't think on-the-fly scaling, especially complicated one is a
good solution to a problem.
I think the est way is to find a set of TrueType fonts with adapted
typefaces, render them to different sizes and add unifont as fallback.
We could use on-the-fly cached scaling for unifont fallback and so its
slowness will be less of a problem and may be better alternative than
time required to load multiple versions of unifont. Also quality in this
case is less of an issue too.
> 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.
>   
Chinese people are usually familiar with either pinyin or
Cantonese-based transliteration since they are widely used in Input Methods
> 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.
>
>   
Transliterating Arabic isn't good idea. It will make GRUB look like a
big SMS
But we don't speak of same issues either. The only issues is that
Japanese or Chinese may see a similar symbol with similar rendering but
from other language. It may be unnice but is understandable. If we
really care about right symbol I suggest to use glyph variant codes.
>> 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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>   


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

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