I've written a little Hiragana/Katakana flashcard app and created my own custom kana 
fonts (from the PD Kana/Kanji fonts used by JWPce, etc). However, I'm looking to add 
some more functionality and am reworking my character/font processing. I'm a little 
confused by the Palm (and tools) font support.

Rather than do something arbitrary, I'd like to create a Unicode font that contains 
the Latin and kana codepoints (maybe adding some kanji later). However, it doesn't 
look practical to do this as the Palm font format doesn't support sparse fonts (yes, I 
know it allows for sparse glyphs/images, but the  font bitmap and offset tables are 
dense) and the kana are up at 0x3000 - alot of table entries which could quickly get 
me to the record size limit (this applies for resources as well as pdbs, doesn't it?)

Palm OS supports Japanese. How do they deal with the large font issue?

I don't see any Palm support for aggregating fonts that cover different regions of the 
codepoint space. So, the only solution I see right now is creating fonts with an 
arbitrary dense glyph mapping and have my app convert between UCS2 and that mapping 
before drawing the chars via WinDrawChars. This is basically how my app works now, 
anyway. It's just a little annoying that I can't leverage standards more and other 
apps can't leverage my fonts without explicit support added.

Final thing, Pilrc only supports creating font resources with < 256 glyphs and doesn't 
support codepoints greater than 255 even though the Palm format does. Is this because 
of a Palm OS issue, a Pilrc implementation issue, or just a lack of demand for the 
feature? I'm probably going to end up writing my own font resource generator.

Thanks,
donn
-- 
For information on using the Palm Developer Forums, or to unsubscribe, please see 
http://www.palmos.com/dev/support/forums/

Reply via email to