Some of you may know that I've been intermittently trying to analyze
the fonts I use. This is now completed, details can be found at
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/zarniwhoop/ttf-font-analysis/ttf-otf-notes.html
Why did I do this ? I had too many fonts - over the years I've
picked up various fonts when I found they provided glyphs
("codepoints") that were used somewhere but which I didn't have.
Eventually it got to the point that I had two screens worth of fonts
(when selecting which font to use) and for many of them I wasn't
quite sure what they contributed.
Perhaps I should add that I haven't installed the Xorg legacy fonts
for several years. The only issue I've seen was the lack of a square
root keycap in xcalc. But then, I don't use xterm either, I use
rxvt-unicode and probably piss off its maintainer by only using xft
fonts :) Xterm itself doesn't seem to handle xft fonts well (i.e.
using fontconfig to find missing glyphs), but maybe that is just a
config issue. Does anyone else think we could get rid of the legacy
xorg fonts and save a page in the book, or is that just me ?
It turns out that the biggest contributor to my excess of fonts was
installing everything that a package provided. If that is just bold,
italic, and regular variants it's no big deal - but some of the font
packages ship several different "faces" (e.g. kochi and baekmuk from
what is currently listed in the book).
Beyond that, I've attempted to list what a font covers. Starting
with a "glyphs" file (one line per codepoint, so you can grep them):
that name is probably a bad idea, but it's too late to change it
now.
And then "coverage" files where I've batched the codepoints under
the Unicode headings. These are readable, and give some idea of what
a font might cover (unfortunately, some of the headings are a bit
iffy, e.g. IPA (phonetics) includes glyphs which are used in some
languages, and sometimes gaps have been deliberately left.
So lastly there are example PDFs illustrating what the characters
look like. To save space I've only listed lowercase variants of
the latin, cyrillic and greek letters. For other writing systems
I've tried to include all non-combining non-"mark" non-number
glyphs - for many Asian systems pango is used to combine the
vowel signs with other letters. Non-text characters, except for
common 0-9, are ignored. I've also attempted to give example text
(Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights - it's
traditional) where I have been able to find pastable versions. But
for CJK, showing all the glyphs isn't going to work - there are
thousands of them, the PDFs would be too big. For these fonts, and
also separately in two CJK example PDFs, I've shown most of the
codepoints noted at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification
i.e. glyphs which might differ between traditional chinese,
simplified chinese, japanese, and (theoretically) korean - modern
vietnamese uses the latin alphabet, and almost all the korean text
on the internet uses only hangul instead of a mixture of hangul
and hanja (what koreans call this script).
Comments, either on the list or in private, are welcome.
I stopped at a point where all _current_ writing systems which can
actually be found on the internet are covered by at least one font.
One of my aims is to get text to render - even if I cannot begin to
read it. I loathe the "box with dots" (or, worse, the blank space in
some of the CJK fonts) where a glyph is not available, and I've long
since given up on the traditional fonts - as have most modern
distros.
If anyone reading this actually reads one of the CJK languages,
I would be interested to know which font(s) you prefer - the BLFS
text on TTF fonts hasn't significantly altered since Alexander
Patrakov was around. For several years I used to use fireflysung
and everything chinese seemed to render (I had the kochi and baekmuk
fonts for japanese and chinese). But fedora offers ukai and uming,
and both OpenSuse and Mandriva seem to use opendesktop-fonts
(odosung, etc) which is apparently a newer version of fireflysung.
ĸen
--
das eine Mal als Tragödie, das andere Mal als Farce
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