Re: fonts for gfxmenu, help needed

[Qianqian Fang]

hi list

My friend brought me attention to this thread, and
I am very glad to see a better CJK support is now
on the agenda of grub. As a Chinese font developer,
I am willing to help, share information or build
fonts for this specific need.

I wasn't really following how fonts were used in grub,
and still had the (wrong) impression that only 256
glyphs are allowed for each file. After opening the
overlay_2009-07-19 tarball, I saw large files such as
unifont are included, so, I guess now grub is able
to handle the full unicode (or BMP) fonts including
CJK ones, is this correct? do they have to be bitmaps?

If the answers to my above questions are "yes", then
I think you may consider a customized version
of "WenQuanYi Bitmap Song" [1], which is a multi-strike
bitmap font containing >27000 Chinese Han glyphs
at 9pt,10pt,10.5pt,11pt and 12pt sizes. The Latin
part of this font are not "monospaced", but we
can either merge it with other mono Latin fonts
(GPL compatible), or use fallback to get around it.

I saw you already have the later version of
GNU Unifont installed, if that's the case, then
you can skip the 12pt of WenQuanYi Bitmap Song,
because most of the CJK glyphs in Unifont 5.1
were ported from WQY's bitmap font last year by
Paul Hardy [2].

About format, I don't know if you can use ttf
file, or SFNT ttf file (with only embedded bitmaps).
WQY Bitmap Song has an SFNT TTF version [3]. It appears
that freetype2 works fine with it, but fontconfig
has difficulties. Using SFNT TTF, the uncompressed
font size is about 3M (with 9,10,11,12pt),which
is fairly lightweight.

If grub happens to be able to process vector
ttf fonts, I would recommend DroidSansFallback [4]
or the derived WenQuanYi Micro Hei [5]. They both
covers a huge span of languages, and the second one
have a lot more CJK glyphs and both proportional
and monospaced species.

Please let me know if you have any further comments,

Qianqian


[1] http://wenq.org/enindex.cgi?BitmapSong_en
[2] http://unifoundry.com/unifont.html
[3] http://sourceforge.net/projects/wqy/files/wqy-bitmapfont-pkgsrc/0.8.1/
[4] 
http://android.git.kernel.org/?p=platform/frameworks/base.git;a=tree;f=data/fonts;hb=HEAD
[5] http://wenq.org/enindex.cgi?MicroHei%28en%29



*From*:         Michal Suchanek
*Subject*:      Re: fonts for gfxmenu, help needed
*Date*:         Wed, 25 Nov 2009 17:04:59 +0100

------------------------------------------------------------------------

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

> />>/
> />> 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./
>
> / show grub menu with pinyin? Âit is very very stupid./

I guess most people in Europe simply don't understand that pinyin is
unreadable.

Fortunately, displaying Chinese characters should be well within the
capabilities of current gfxterm although the font is likely poor
quality.

Any testers who can tell the difference between commonly used Chinese
fonts and GNU Unifont are welcome.

Thanks

Michal