Re: [Enigma-devel] Russian Localization

[Ronald Lamprecht]

Hi,

Daniel Heck wrote:
> > As a first experiment I took
> > http://www.freelang.com/download/fonts/ttf_russe_kurierkoi8.zip as it
> > has a licence that allows to modify the font. Thus I copied the cyrillic
> > characters to dustismo_bold.ttf and added the corresponding unicode
> > mappings.
>
> Unfortunately the license of ttf_russe_kurierkoi8.zip is incompatible
> with that of the Dustismo font.  Although the former does permit
> modification, it explicitly disallows selling the font and therefore
> conflicts with the GPL used by Dustismo.

It has been an experiment - please revert the font if you think it is an
urgent issue.

> > > There is a GPL'ed font called ttf-thyromanes that can be found in
> > > debian, and it includes cyrillic (in addition to latin, greek, and IPA).
> > >
> > > The font has no hinting or kerning, which is a downside especially for
> > > small font sizes.
>  
> The original Dustismo font also had no good hinting, but one run through
> Fontforge's autohinting improved the visual appearance of the font
> inside Enigma tremendously.  So I don't see this as a major problem.
> Same for the missing kerning information; Dustismo, for example, only
> has a handful of kerning pairs and still looks quite good.
>
> > @Daniel: Please have a look at the different available fonts and decide
> > which font, or which mix we should use in future.
>
> Personally, I don't think mixing different fonts is a good idea -- the
> result will always look ugly and unprofessional.  Thryomanes from
> http://www.io.com/~hmiller/lang/ appears to be reasonably complete font,
> although it has serifs which may not look too good.  But maybe we could
> use it anyway, at least as an interim solution.

This font looks complete concerning Enigma's demands. Actually it is 
more complete than any other cyrillic one.

Just the characters are a little bit wider and cause some strings in
different languages to be cut off slightly. The numbers are much wider
and would cause some code corrections. If the font selection is an
interim solution we might think of mixing a font to avoid these trouble. 
Mixing a latin font with a cyrillic+greek font does not harm in general 
as you usually have to use different fonts in a document to display the 
characters from different code pages. But a homogeneous font looks much 
better of course. And I admit that a sans serif font looks better for 
the menus.

@Daniel: would you please improve the selected font by autohinting etc. 
and replace the current experiment.

- Ronald