Kaixo!
On Sat, Jun 10, 2000 at 02:20:41PM +0200, Denis HAVLIK wrote:
> :~>We (lithuanian users) need more ISO iso8859-13 font's (now is only 1
> :~>font:
> :~>mdk-helvetica-medium-r-normal--10-100-75-75-p-57-iso8859-13 from CD's
> :~>/Mandrake/mdkinst/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts directory)
> :~>I hope in future Linux Mandrake distributions I see package like
> :~>fonts-ttf-east_european.rpm or something.
>
> OK, just submitt the fonts to cooker, and we include them.
I received a set of Type1 (postscript) fonts for iso-8859-13; however, under
X11, they need a patch to XFree86 to have them properly displayed (type1
fonts encode the glyphs inside them by theur name; those fonts have the
proper names, not fake latin1 names (and that is a good thing); however there
isn't on XFree86 a table to map a set of type1 glyph names to iso-8859-13
encoding.
It's not a difficult patch, but it has to be done.
For True Type, they encode their glyphs by unicode value (by glyph name too;
but there are several tables; and xfs uses them by unicode value and not
by glyph name; which is good as oftent TTF have incorrect glyph names);
so it is easier to use a TTF as it doesn't need any change to X11 at all.
But I haven't seen any freely distributable TTF with the proper letters on it.
> :~>I hope in future Linux Mandrake distributions I see package like
> :~>fonts-ttf-east_european.rpm or something.
That would depend of which letters are included in the TTF; fonts included
in Windows (like Arial, etc) have a set of glyphs that covers
all of iso-8859-{1,2,3,4,5,7,9,10,13,14,15}, koi8-{r,u},
and of course all cp125[0123].
Some may also include hebrew and arabic glyphs (it is the case of the Arial
I have).
With a font like that; you can cover a lot of encodings supported by Mandrake
with just a single *.ttf; and make a package "fonts-ttf".
Biut, sadly, most TTF that can be distributed freely only have a very reduced
set of glyphs, making them usable only for one encoding...
In particular I never saw a freely distributable TTF font that includes
glyphs to cover both iso-8859-2 (east europe) and iso-8859-13 (baltic);
so two different ttf files need to be included...
that is a waste of disk space, and also more complex to handle, as languages
that use the latin script gets to use different fonts (different names
to use in config files; different look and feel, etc).
That is indeed a problem.
PS: Often also TTFs are not encoded in unicode, but only in a 256 chars
matrix corresponding to a given 8bits encoding. I got a copy of ttf_edit,
a program allowing to re-encode the TTF fonts, so I can made them encoded
in unicode (xfs requires that to use them).
So I'm collecting fonts and, provided the author agrees, re-encoding them.
So far I collectedr several fonts for armenian, cyrillic (with all the
glyphs needed for all cyrillic encodings currently supported), iranian
(but they don't cover Arabic, as two letters used in Arabic and not
in Farsi are missing :-\ ), and vietnamese.
Also some fonts suitable for Esperanto; but they are incomplete (they have
the glyphs used by Esperanto but almost all other accentuated chars of
iso-8859-3 are missing --> drakfont won't recognize them).
--
Ki �a vos v�ye b�n,
Pablo Saratxaga
http://www.srtxg.easynet.be/ PGP Key available, key ID: 0x8F0E4975
