[sword-devel] Foreign Font Management

Co Ho sword-devel@crosswire.org
Wed, 19 Jul 2000 10:54:58 -0700


Hi Troy,

May be my comment was really really late, but I just want you to know that
in some of the modules, like Vietnamese for instance, the font setting is
more important than the language setting since in my country, we have no
standardized native fonts yet, so ISO standard would not help.

Co.

-----Original Message-----
From: Troy A. Griffitts [mailto:scribe@crosswire.org]
Sent: Friday, May 26, 2000 7:41 PM
To: sword-devel@crosswire.org
Subject: Re: [sword-devel] Foreign Font Management


Thanks Matthias,
	Good suggestion.
	Things are a little more complicated than this, however. 
Unfortunately, fonts are encoded differently.  We use a 'wingreek'
encoded font for our N27U4 greek text.  This is not a standard greek
font encoding.  Currently, only the UIs use this entry, and it has
traditionally been used to represent a TTF (windows-mostly) font name. 
These same fonts and their encodings can be installed on linux and will
then allow display of the module.
	Maybe we should try something like encoding=, but I don't know of a
good way to designate font encoding name in a standard way.  Maybe we
could have our own 'registry' of encodings that modules need and the UI
could keep a map {encoding, font} that it knows how to deal with. 
dunno.  Thanks for the thoughts.  More feedback would be great!

	-Troy.



Matthias Ansorg wrote:
> 
> proposal:
> 
> replacing the "font=" entry of the modules' .conf - files with a
> "lang=" entry that indicates the language of the module using the
> standard ISO abbreviations, such as "lang=en" (English), "lang=de"
> (German), "lang=el" (Greek).
> 
> advantages:
> 
> -- font names are not portable (Windows has other font names than
> Linux), neither does a font name such as "symbol" include information
> about style, point size etc. And, unfortunately, the standard X
> fontname descriptions aren't available under Windows.
> -- more flexibility on the frontend's side: it does not require a
> certain font to display a module, but could choose fonts
> automatically, depending on the language, when first displaying a
> module. The user would no have to do any configuration himself.
> However, I assume that it is possible to get the language of a *font*.
> -- language is a more general to use information than a font's name
> 
> In Christ Jesus,
> <>< Matthias