On 30 Mar 2010, at 23:00, Greg Ercolano wrote:
Yeah, linux is a real PITA with fonts.. it works so well/easily
on the other platforms.
I suspect that's a lot like the swan swimming - all serene and
graceful from above, legs thrashing away like crazy under the water...
I'm sure that linux/X11 does provide all the tools we'd need, just
not so easily and tidily integrated as OSX and winXX has it.
I wonder what tricks programs like firefox and google chrome
are doing. Maybe fonts is why firefox takes so long to load.
Could be... I'm sure that we can use Fontconfig to "merge" multiple
fonts together to get a "superfont" that covers all the likely
Unicode pages, or perhaps to make a mechanism to add fonts into our
"superfont" as we encounter glyphs not already loaded...
I'm pretty sure this is what pango and the like do for gnome, and I
guess also firefox etc...
Chrome comes up pretty fast (but it's young, yet..!)
I've found that on Fedora7, Sazanami Gothic works pretty well
("yum install japanese-fonts") showing antialiased fonts in FLTK.
Yup, I find if I stick to all Latin (or at least all LGC) glyphs, or
all Japanese (and/or simple Chinese) then any one font seems to be OK
- and a lot of the CJK fonts have a pretty good Latin page in them
anyway, so Japanese + English usually works out fine.
But even a tiny hint of Hebrew or Arabic and things start to get a
bit flaky...!
If you ever find this let me know.
I looked - was not really successful.
When we were making a room for the baby, I put about a half-a-dozen
old machines out to charities and such, and I think a lot of stuff
was deleted when those machines got purged...
But... I did find the test harness I used when I was playing about
with testing font coverage - which eventually became the now-lost app.
I've attached a zip, in case it is found useful. Not the tidiest bit
of code, but works OK, and I tweaked it this evening to compile OK
with fltk-1.3 on my ubuntu laptop.
I seem to recall you might have posted something font related
a while ago that I compiled and noodled around with.. can't
remember clearly what that was.
Might have been that - though there was a bunch of stuff about CJK
font rendering that might be more likely?
Currently I am taking advantage of the fact that FLTK can
be told to use multiple fonts (ie. comma separated font names)
and it does seem to pick the one that works when I go back and
forth between two OSs that each support a different font.
Yes - and I keep mentioning that there are patches from Timothy Lee
to extend that further - we really ought to get around to checking
those patches over, but they are pretty extensive and I have never
managed to get right through it all...
I've been making the raw font names available to the user
in a config file for the app, so that if they can't install
that particular font, they can change the font names in the
config file.
I used Fl_Preferences, and provided a font-picker widget to let them
select a font that worked, then stored the "known good" font in the
prefs for next time...
Anyway, all being well, attached as a zip is the text_checker test
harness I wrote, in the hope that it may prove helpful!
--
Ian
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