Salaam, everyone, I recently proposed a font selection "widget" which will classify fonts into script categories. For example, Arabic fonts would be automagically classified into an "Arabic" category, Chinese fonts into a "Chinese" category, and so on, thus providing a degree of sane organization to font collections on Open Source platforms. The intent is that this widget should be used in Open Source desktop software such as Gnome and KDE. Please see the proposal here:
http://eyegene.ophthy.med.umich.edu/unicode/fontdialog/ ... to get a feeling for what I am talking about. Be sure to click on the "Solution" tab to see some illustrative mockups of what this software component might look like. The original announcement of the proposal was posted to the Gnome i18n, KDE, OpenOffice, Gimp, and Inkscape developer lists. You can review the original announcement by clicking on the "Comments And Feedback" tab on the above-mentioned web page. Having proposed this, I and a colleague of mine are now working on creating an an implementation of the proposal in software (Please feel free to write me if you are interested in the details). In the proposal I note that many non-Latin fonts, including the Arabeyes.org fonts, only have TTF names in English. As a solution, I propose using alias names in an XML configuration file, something like this: <fontmenu> <category> Arabic <font> ae_AlArabiya <!-- THIS ENTRY LACKS AN ALIAS --> </font> <font> ae_arab <alias> عرب </alias> </font> <font> ae_khalid <alias> خلد </alias> </font> <font> ae_tholoth <alias> ثلث </alias> </font> </category> </fontmenu> Although the idea of font aliases will probably work, after I thought about this some more, I have to ask the question: Why not just put Arabic names directly into the fonts themselves ? This is already being done for a number of East Asian Open Source fonts, such as the following: FILE----> /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/truetype/fireflysung.ttf FAMILY-1> AR PL New Sung FAMILY-2> 文鼎ＰＬ新宋 STYLE---> Regular FILE----> /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/truetype/cwkai.ttf FAMILY-1> cwTeXKai FAMILY-2> cwTeX 楷書 STYLE---> Medium FILE----> /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/truetype/UnDotumBold.ttf FAMILY-1> UnDotum FAMILY-2> \uc740 \ub3cb\uc6c0 STYLE---> Bold (See: http://eyegene.ophthy.med.umich.edu/unicode/fontguide/ for references for these and other Open Source fonts) In the above, "FAMILY_1" is the first entry in the TTF names table for "family", and "FAMILY_2" is the second entry. If the Arabeyes Khotot project were in the future to release the Arabic font collection with the very small addition of the FontFamily name in Arabic in the second slot of the names table, then there will be less need to use "alias" names in the font selection widget that I proposed. This will make my job easier :-) . But of course, the point is not *really* to make my job easier (although that is nice too!), but to provide the best possible solution to the Open Source community at large. I look forward to hearing your responses to this proposal, as well as any additional comments that any of you may have regarding the Font Selection Widget proposal in general. Ma Salaame-- -- Ed Trager _______________________________________________ Developer mailing list [email protected] http://lists.arabeyes.org/mailman/listinfo/developer
