Kaixo! On Sun, Sep 30, 2001 at 03:43:57PM +0100, Markus Kuhn wrote:
> I still have a bit the suspicion that font merging is primarily needed to > satisfactorily display pathologic pages such as > > http://www.columbia.edu/kermit/utf8.html Yes that is an extreme case; but there are other possible cases that are in fact quite common (I have had various mails from people requesting how to do it), like: * French and modern Greek * French and ancient (polytonic) Greek * French and Arabic * Russian and Hebrew * French and Japanese * French and Chinese * Spanish and Japanese * iso-8859-1 + IPA symbols (for linguistic pages, grammars, etc. of modern roman languages) * Azeri Cyrillic (it has extra letters than Russian) and Latin Azeri (it needs an extra letter than iso-8859-9). * French and Vietnamese Those are real needs from real people, and only a few fonts are available for the needs 1, 2, 3 and 10. I know of no font at all that covers the others. > which are certainly cool demos, but they mix far too many scripts to be a > realistic and in any way representative application demonstration. The problem is not the mixing of a lot of script the problem is that even with only two scripts you have big chances to lack a font; for example I know of *no* font having glyphs for both Japanese and French. French studiants of Japanese are continuosly faced with that problem. The problem is X11 cannot know in advance what specific scripts will be needed by a given user; so the better is to allow them all. > What > fraction of X11 users exchange email with the editors of > Japanese<->Ethiopian dictionary editors on a regular basis? The examples above are from mails I received from about 20 different people; all of them using GNU/Linux. It is most probable that much more persons with similar needs exist (in particular you can see the big presence of French, because I'm active in French speaking newsgroups; but I suppose you can replace French with German, Russian, Spanish, Polish, Portuguese, etc. and find in each case several persons wanting it). > Usually, users are prefectly able to pick the fonts manually that have the > coverage and style they really need, No. Tell me which font I can use that covers both Japanese and French ? Font merging is useful, and is needed. You don't need it, but that doesn't means it isn't useful for others. > and if a glyph is missing from that > font, it will typically also not be readable for the user. Of course, until font merging isn't available that will be the case. That is indeed the problem that needs to be solved. > Mixing fonts > automatically can lead often to far more ugly results than had the > application just stuck with a single font and used its default glyph for > everything missing. Even ugly a readable text is better than having "?" or blank squares. > Terminal emulator users are not interested in glyph merging, It is indeed less important; but not because of the nature of the xterm, but because xterms are often used only as a command line interface. text editing/reading is done on other windows. For people using the xterms to read/write text font merging is still a good feature. > because they typically use bitmap fonts They "typically" use bitmap fonts because XFree86 comes without scalable charcell fonts! It's not a deliberate user choice, there is no choice. I use gnome-terminal with Lucida Console TTF font; and if I use xterm with a bitmap font it's only because I don't have any scalable font with a unicode coverage as big as some of the bitmap fonts coming with XFree86. (yes I use xterm in utf-8 mode and gnome-terminal in iso-8859-15) But if font merging was possible with xterm, and if it handled correctly the hairy problem of column positionning in such a case (font merging for other applications isn't as problematic as it is for an xterm); then I would be using xterm with scalable fonts, and merged ones in order to have the widest possible coverage of unicode. PS: while I'm at it, there seems to be a bug in xterm: when launched with -lc the display works nice, the pasting works too; but the copying from the xterm is always done in utf-8 bytes; that is if I have a ccedilla on xterm screen and I copy and paste it (to another program or even to the same xterm) what is pasted is a Atilde + section; that is the iso-8859-1 values of the two bytes making the ccedilla. That makes the use of xterm in non utf-8 mode a bit problematic. Thanks -- Ki �a vos v�ye b�n, Pablo Saratxaga http://www.srtxg.easynet.be/ PGP Key available, key ID: 0x8F0E4975 _______________________________________________ I18n mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/i18n
