Re: fonts for gfxmenu, help needed

[feng shu]

2009/11/25 Vladimir 'φ-coder/phcoder' Serbinenko <address@hidden>:
> Michal Suchanek wrote:
>>
>> The difference is that the font is only a bitmap whereas scaling
>> inside grub can do blending which should give much better results than
>> scaling bitmap into another bitmap.
>>
>>
> What do you mean by blending? Do you mean pixels with alpha channels?
>>> The best way to choose between pre-scaling and scaling in grub is
>>> benchmarking. Multiple fonts take longer to load but scaling even with
>>> caching is likely to cause more performance hit.
>>> How much fonts does an author need? We need either decrease number of
>>> fonts simultaneously used or have faster font loader (both in preference).
>>> As Robert said most important is to get things going and theme creators
>>> can use other free fonts as well
>>>
>>
>> Typically people want at the very least
>>
>>  - serif font
>>  - sans-serif font
>>  - multiple sizes of the above so that the menu can have a larger
>> title / be scaled to different screen sizes
>>
>> Sure, some would want their exact font in which the logo of their
>> distribution is writen but this is outside of scope of Grub.
>>
>>
>>>>  - there is a problem with Simplified Chinese/Traditional
>>>> Chinese/Japanese. Some of the glyphs used by these writing systems
>>>> have the same unicode codepoint but are slightly different in each. To
>>>> get these rendered correctly you need special font for each. Blame the
>>>> Unicode people.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>> Let's not get into Unihan flamewar. There are other problems with other
>>> languages which are more serious. Here are few of them:
>>> 1) combining diacritics.
>>> 2) ligatures. Important for indic languages
>>> 3) context variants. Important for Arabic writing system.
>>> 4) bidi. Important for Hebrew and Arabic writing system.
>>>
>>> Generally current gfxterm is pretty much unsuited for any of these 4
>>> problems. And gotoxy is pretty ambiguous in bidi context
>>> Few useful links:
>>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Multilingual_support
>>> http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia:Unicode/Test/arabe
>>>
>>>
>>
>> Not being able to use combining diacritics sucks. Does that mean that
>> grub won't be able to draw decomposed Unicode strings?
>>
> I haven't checked. But I suppose it doesn't since it stores one
> codepoint per on-screen place
>> Either way the four points above are things that gfxterm simply does
>> not support
> It may need a major changes to support :( And these changes may
> propagate through whole terminal system (gotoxy concept is flawed)
>> whereas Unihan flamewars are inherent feature of Unicode
>>
> You seem have missed variant selectors
> (last paragraph of
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unihan#Graphemes_versus_glyphs)
> And we're back to multichar per on-screen place problem
>> and the gfxterm technically should be able to display CJK languages
>> given a good enough font.
>>
>> Also if worse comes to worst Indic, Arabic or Hebrew can be feasibly
>> written in Latin, Chinese cannot.
>>
> pinyin. I know it's disagreable to read for native speakers, but it's
> similar for Arabic.

show grub menu with pinyin?  it is very very stupid.

> In worst case we can just say Japanese people to install Japanese fonts
> only and bear with Chinese having a bit wrong rendering and vice-versa.
>> Thanks
>>
>> Michal
>>
>>
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>>
>>
>
>
> --
> Regards
> Vladimir 'φ-coder/phcoder' Serbinenko
>
>
>
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