----- Original Message ----- From: "Daniel Heck" <address@hidden>
To: "Ronald Lamprecht" <address@hidden>
Cc: "Tacvek" <address@hidden>; "Дремук Сергей"
<address@hidden>; <address@hidden>
Sent: Tuesday, July 04, 2006 3:45 AM
Subject: Re: [Enigma-devel] Russian Localization
Ronald Lamprecht wrote:
Hi,
Tacvek wrote:
Ronald Lamprecht wrote:
@Daniel: AFAIK our current font does not support cyrillic
characters.
How should we support them?
Frankly, I don't know... Are there any any free cyrillic truetype
fonts
that we could distribute with Enigma? A quick google search did
not turn
up anything.
There are several sources for cyrillic ttf fonts:
http://www.freelang.net/fonts/index.html
http://babel.uoregon.edu/yamada/fonts/russian.html
As a first experiment I took
http://www.freelang.com/download/fonts/ttf_russe_kurierkoi8.zip as it
has a licence that allows to modify the font. Thus I copied the
cyrillic
characters to dustismo_bold.ttf and added the corresponding unicode
mappings.
Unfortunately the license of ttf_russe_kurierkoi8.zip is incompatible
with that of the Dustismo font. Although the former does permit
modification, it explicitly disallows selling the font and therefore
conflicts with the GPL used by Dustismo.
There is a GPL'ed font called ttf-thyromanes that can be found in
debian, and it includes cyrillic (in addition to latin, greek, and
IPA).
The font has no hinting or kerning, which is a downside especially for
small font sizes.
The original Dustismo font also had no good hinting, but one run through
Fontforge's autohinting improved the visual appearance of the font
inside Enigma tremendously. So I don't see this as a major problem.
Same for the missing kerning information; Dustismo, for example, only
has a handful of kerning pairs and still looks quite good.
Was fontforge also responsible for the noticable decrease in file size
versus the original Dustimo font?
Annother suggestion:
Perhaps the DejaVu fonts, specifically DejaVu Sans. DejaVu is an
extended version of Bitstream Vera, so it should fit in well with Enigma.
They have more or less the same licence as Bistream Vera.
The font covers over 100 languages,
with full Latin, Greek, and cyrillic, (A few combining diacritics from
latin are missing, but alsmost any one that would actually be used is
there), and some other areas, including the full braille section, and
many of the symbol sections.)
In other words it should support any language that uses Latin,
Cyrillic, or Greek characters, and perhaps a couple of other languages
as well, and has plenty of symbols.
Indeed the only reasons not to use this font seem to be:
1. No support for most east asian languages,
2. Licence not GPL-compatible (but it is free, and DFSG-free, and
being data, it does not need compatability
with the main program).
3. Quite a bit larger than Vera Sans. vera_sans.ttf is 38 KB, and
DejaVuSans.ttf is 450 KB. (However, that is not horribly much compared
to the total size of Enigma.)
4. The character sizes in Vera/Dejavu are somewhat larger than with
Dustismo.