grub-devel
[Top][All Lists]
Advanced

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: fonts for gfxmenu, help needed


From: Qianqian Fang
Subject: Re: fonts for gfxmenu, help needed
Date: Thu, 26 Nov 2009 19:48:08 -0500
User-agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.23 (X11/20090817)

Michal Suchanek wrote:
Grub is capable of displaying variable width fonts but monospace fonts
may be preferred for some uses.
Ideally grub should use as few fonts as possible so a font with both
CJK glyphs and Latin glyphs is preferable.
As you pointed out the glyphs in Unifont are mostly ported from wqy
fonts so unifont would be one such font.
We may need a special font for Japanese and a method to load different
primary font when displaying the grub menu in Japanese is desired or
extend grub to support combining variant marks.

Unfortunately, unifont is only provided in single variant and size
which is most troublesome in my view.
I expect that theme authors would want at least two font variants
(Song, Hei) and some larger font sizes for captions or displaying
simple few line menu on high resolution screens.

ok, I think I am getting clear now. Grub can load pan-unicode
(1-bit) bitmap fonts of various sizes. Grub needs 1) good bitmap
fonts with CJK coverage (and possibility Latin) at multiple
point sizes, 2) preferably with Song and Hei styles as well as
3) Han glyph CJK variant support.

Personally, I would rank the likelihood of the above
goals in 1>3>2. Basically, for #1, WQY Bitmap Song (xfonts-wqy
in Debian/Ubuntu) is what you are looking for (together
with GNU unifont).

For #2, it depends on how grub handles language and fallback
and does need a lot of cautions, otherwise, it can be a pain.
AFAIK, there are not many good free Japanese bitmap fonts
covers the 9~12pt ranges. Mplus [1] bitmaps have OK quality,
but only have 8pt and 9pt (8pt is not a readable size); then
efonts [2], xfonts-intl-japanese, GNU intlfonts [3] and
HabianCJK [4] contain pretty much the same set of low-quality
Kanji bitmaps at 9pt, 10.5pt, 18pt and 24px, where IMHO,
the 9pt and 10.5pt are rather not readable; 18pt is sort of
ok, but wider than GNU unifont by 1px.

If you really want to include Japanese bitmaps, you may
also try to convert DroidSansJapanese [5]. But I think it
needs a lot of fine tuning in order to get the rasterized
glyphs readable.

For #3, it is difficult, and probably not necessary. The
differences between Song/Mincho and Hei/Gothic is rather
not distinguishable in screen sizes. You have to get above
20pt to see differences (which is largely weight different).
We call WQY bitmap song, but truly, it is not really the Song
style, because we eliminated all the serif due to small space.

If what you meant is to have "another style" in addition to
what we have in GNU unifont, then, you may rasterize WQY Micro Hei [6]
or WQY Zen Hei [7] to bitmaps, but again, I don't have faith on
the readability of the outcome unless someone spend years
to manually fine tune.


In summary, I think goal #1 is ready to go, #2 needs more
input from Japanese users, and some additional work; #3
needs a lot of work, and perhaps not really that important.

Also, I want to add that Japanese people CAN read
simplified-Chinese styled Kanji. It's not pleasant, but
not unrecognizable (it's like simplified Chinese users
can understand traditional Chinese, but they don't use it).


Qianqian


[1] http://mplus-fonts.sourceforge.jp/mplus-bitmap-fonts/index.html
[2] http://openlab.ring.gr.jp/efont/unicode/
[3] http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/intlfonts/
[4] http://wakaba-web.hp.infoseek.co.jp/hcjk/
[5] http://android.git.kernel.org/?p=platform/frameworks/base.git;a=tree;f=data/fonts;hb=HEAD
[6] http://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=ttf-wqy-microhei
[7] http://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=ttf-wqy-zenhei




reply via email to

[Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread]