[Adonthell-devel] TFF support for v0.3 on the way

[ksterker]

Hi all,

as you might have seen on adonthell-general, a dutch translation for Waste's 
Edge has been release 6 weeks ago [1].

Dutch, like French, German and most other languages uses some symbols that 
aren't in our old font, so it doesn't look too good. As Joel is busy and no 
help on the horizon, I've decided to implement TTF support myself. Started 
yesterday and am halfway done :-). It's rather a quick and dirty hack, but I 
think it's worth the two or three evenings spent. Releasing v0.3.4 might 
attract a few people able to help with v0.4 development.

TTF support is enabled by subclassing win_font. That means, the interface 
itself is pretty much unchanged. Further more, if no ttf font file is 
available, the engine will fallback to the included bitmap font with just a 
warning or two. That means, using 0.3.4 engine with 0.3.3 data or vice versa 
will not break anything :-). It also means that every glyph is rendered just 
once. Unlike the old fonts, glyphs are rendered when they are required, as a 
ttf font might contain many more glyphs than a language will ever use.

Remains the question which font to use at all. Are there free, fancy fonts that 
contain a large enough subset of unicode to work for all translation we'll ever 
have? 

As I doubt this, I will make the font to use configurable. So, for example, to 
use a Russian translation, one might have to specify a different font. Sasha, 
if you'd have some insights in this issue, could you tell how other projects 
handle this?


Comments and suggestions for the font to use are welcome. So far I've tested 
with Avatar.ttf:
    http://ultima.gogab.com/findx.html

James suggested:
    http://www.webpagepublicity.com/free-fonts/b/Blackadder%20ITC.ttf

But we'd still have to check whether they are truly free and contain all 
required glyphs.

Kai


[1] http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/adonthell-general/2004-10/msg00000.html