Re: System fonts

[Banlu Kemiyatorn]

On Thu, 26 Aug 2004 14:19:13 +0900, Kazunobu Kuriyama
<kazunobu.kuriyama@nifty.com> wrote:
> Yen-Ju Chen wrote:
> 
> >>
> >> Have I misunderstood how Xft and fontconfig work? I thought this was
> >> already possible with back-x11 now. It was my main reason for changing
> >> away from back-art.  http://freedesktop.org/Software/fontconfig
> >
> >
> >  I forgot what's the exact result of back-x11,
> >  but I remembered back-x11 work for Chinese font as well as back-art,
> >  as long as only one font is chosen.

May be it is better to call it back-xlib?

I'm agreeing with neither doing glyph substitution in the backend nor trying
to mix 2 fonts into one. If one want to do that, I think it is better to do that
with fontforge. However, I think it is not a bad idea to do glyph substitution
in AppKit level. ie. (I think this is also Mac OS X's behavior) if one set
a string to a font which doesn't provide the neccessary glyph, AppKit should
be optionally changed the characters to the font that contains the available
glyphs.


> >  For example,
> >  if I choose a "ChineseFont" as NSUserFont and use it to display text,
> >  it will use "ChineseFont" to display both latin and chinese glyph
> >  because this "ChineseFont" contain both latin and chinese glyph.
> >  But the latin glyph is ugly and is not fixed-pitched,
> >  which cause problem in Terminal.app.
> > (Chinese glyph is always fixed-pitched due to the nature of its
> > character).
> >  If I choose a "EnglishFont" as NSUserFont and use it to display text,
> >  all the chinese glyph will not display,
> >  though the latin glyph is good-looking.
> 
> What do some people here mean by the ugliness of some fonts?  Are you
> talking about ligature and kerning, which we don't need for CJK proper
> script?

I think Yen-Ju is quite clear about the latin characters provided by
the CJK fonts
that is ugly. I still insist that mixing fonts at the backend isn't a
better approach
than using fontforge to generate new fonts. The fall back behavior should be
used _only_ to decrease unusability. And the font rendering engine should make
it clear to users that shown glyphs are substituted. (eg. drawing bbox around
the glyphs)

That's my 2 satang.

]d