> > Calculating pixels would be more difficult, but not impossible. You > > can't just count characters, though -- you'd have to read the characters > > and calculate their total length (using a file that the admin user > > supplies, containing characters and their pixel lengths). So doing it > > based on pixels is possible but rather more involved. > > > > Samuel > > Well, for Latin based languages I guess this might work, but will be a > humongous amount of work. Think about the effect of ligatures, for > example. This all depends on the font and the rendering engine that will > be used eventually. For Arabic and Indic languages - well, let's just > say it gets "interesting" with joining, stacked vowels and reordering. > Pango does this of course. But it is definitely not trivial. One would > need to understand the requirements and the operating environment very > well. To emulate this is mostly pointless, I'd say - it is necessary to > use the actual environment to be sure.
Hi Friedel - Thanks for wading in. I see your point. All of the embedded systems that I've been involved with use pre-rendered bitmaps of the fonts that they intend to use. I know that there are some embedded systems out there that have the horsepower to use generalized truetype fonts that can render in any size, italics, bold, etc. However, I think that for most deeply embedded systems, taking a truetype or other general font and rendering it in the size needed in a font cache and then using the newly rendered font to put the text up on the screen is way too compute intensive. I'm talking about systems being developed today using 75MHz PowerPCs. Memory is cheap; processing power is not so cheap. So, when the software sizes up fields during GUI construction, it just takes the string and runs it through the desired pre-rendered font as if it was drawing the string on the screen and calculates the max height and sums the character widths. I can see that what I'm asking for may not be available in a general solution. And I do thank you for bringing up the point that my western-centric head failed to recognize regarding different languages and how the various characters are constructed and the fact that not all languages "run" in the same direction. That's a great big Homer Simpson "Doh!" for me! :) Paul ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Still grepping through log files to find problems? Stop. Now Search log events and configuration files using AJAX and a browser. Download your FREE copy of Splunk now >> http://get.splunk.com/ _______________________________________________ Translate-pootle mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/translate-pootle
