Re: fonts for gfxmenu, help needed

[Michal Suchanek]

2009/11/26 Qianqian Fang <address@hidden>:
> Felix Zielcke wrote:
>>
>> Even with the old .pff font format the whole unicode was possible but it
>> was just slow IIRC.
>> At least it was slow with first version of .pf2 or grub-mkfont.
>> The .pf2 format itself is bitmap but see below. As input for grub-mkfont
>> they can be TTF.
>>
>
> that's great, does the font have to be monospaced (or

Grub is capable of displaying variable width fonts but monospace fonts
may be preferred for some uses.

> dual-width for CJK)? what code point range you want
> this CJK font file to provide? CJK glyphs only?

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.

>
>> As input format for grub-mkconf we support everything libfreetype
>> supports, so TTF too.
>>
>
> I guess you meant grub-mkfont. If that's the case, i.e. grub can
> handle gray-scale bitmaps, then, use grub-mkconf to convert

Grub does not support grayscale in its font format. The pf2 files are
a collection of 1bit deep transparency masks.

> WenQuanYi Micro Hei (Mono) will be my second recommendation
> next to the wqy bitmap song solution.
>
> If grub happens to use fontconfig to handle fallback relationship,
> you do need to be aware about this bug, as fontconfig does not
> have everything to handle sfnt ttf format:
> https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=23336

Grub does not use fontconfig.

Thanks

Michal