Re: fonts for gfxmenu, help needed

[Vladimir 'φ-coder/phcoder' Serbinenko]

Qianqian Fang wrote:
> Vladimir 'φ-coder/phcoder' Serbinenko wrote:
>> Is it possible to have a font with only these characters plus if
>> necessary some computer-specific characters? I don't expect users to
>> write poems in grub and so such reduced font would be well-suited for
>> applications when size matters (e.g. embedding grub2 into flash rom)
>>   
> certainly we can. However the problem is I don't have char-frequency
> statistics for Japanese Kanji/Korean Hanja,
AFAIK Hanja isn't used a lot and in GRUB2 particularly I see only names
which could possibly use Hanja. Also quick look into ko.po of glibc
doesn't reveal any Hanja (even that I can't read either they have
different appearence). But due to nature of Hangul of being basically
arranged syllables out of Jamo we need to include whole 111712
precomposed Hangul. And since even important font rendering engines
prefered to stay away from Jamo composing except when with historical
Jamo I feel like it would be inappropriate to make it in GRUB.
As for Kanji we could stick to Jōyō kanji
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C5%8Dy%C5%8D_kanji] (I think we can
reasonably suppose that all kanji needed for grub2 are within the school
scope)
However I don't pretend to be expert in either Kanji, Hanja, Hangul or
Hanzi, so feel free to correct me.
> also even for Chinese,
> it's from 1980s.
Are there any reasons to believe more sinograms came into general usage
and may be used by grub since then? Will have anyway to have
computer-specific glyphs too.
Is the list you provided about Traditional or Simplified Chinese? What
about the other variant?
>
> We can try IICore [1], which has about 10,000 char.
General-usage fonts are good since they are likely to contain all useful
(for GRUB) glyphs. It just starts to look that we can't significantly
reduce the size of unifont by removing not-so-useful glyphs. 10000 for
Simplified Chinese, 10000 for Traditional Chinese and 10000 for Hangul
and we already have half of BMP/unifont
>
> [1] http://www.ogcio.gov.hk/ccli/eng/structure/iicorecompare.html
>
>> Another question: are glyphs imported into unifont from ttf fonts are
>> vector-based?
>>   
>
> no, they are manually drawn, similar for WenQuanYi's bitmaps. Only that
> way, you can ensure the clearest look in small glyph sizes (and
> it took years).
>
Wow as a coder I would never have supposed that rasterisation would take
so much time and human intervention
>
>
>
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-- 
Regards
Vladimir 'φ-coder/phcoder' Serbinenko

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