[Devel] Re: Linux Console in UTF-8 - current state

[Edward H Trager]

Hi, Werner,

> > WHY NOT CREATE A COMPREHENSIVE, SCALEABLE, STROKE-BASED UNICODE FONT?
> > ---------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> We are in contact with people willing to contribute such a font.  A
> FreeType font driver would be added also.
>
> David, can you already give more information?

I would be interested in contributing to such a project. Please let me
know who is already working on this.  My qualifications for such a project
include knowledge of Asian languages (Thai and Chinese), and once upon a
time, I studied and taught Western calligraphy.  My programming knowledge
is more closely related to bioinformatics and databases.

> > Of course, you would also need a rasterizer for scaling the font(s)
> > -- but it would be easier and simpler to build than any TTF or
> > OpenType rasterizer -- just ask the FreeType2 experts with all of
> > their autohinting expertise to help out here!
>
> You overestimate the amount of time we can invest into FreeType.
> Hinting CJKV fonts is completely different compared to Western fonts,
> and it currently has low priority (volunteers welcome).

Roman Czyborra's bitmap unifont was/is also a big font project, but I
believe it has fairly impressive coverage of the Unicode code space by
now.  I had heard that hinting CJKV, while different from hinting
Latin-based scripts, is not that hard: unfortunately, I have no first-hand
knowledge about the problem (If you want to know who told me that, I can
dig through my email and look it up ...).

> > What's missing is an Open Source implementation that would create an
> > Open Standard for stroke-based fonts.  Another thing missing is that
> > the proprietary stroke-based solutions are only for the CJVK subset:
> > I propose extending that to cover the whole (well, at least Plane 1)
> > of Unicode.
>
> I believe that stroke-based fonts make only sense for CJKV and Hangul
> due to the composite nature of the characters.
>
> > Secondly, and IMHO most importantly, you can, ONCE-AND-FOR-ALL,
> > solve the common problem of having missing glyphs show up as open
> > squares (or worse ...) because you can make the stroke-based font
> > cover the whole range.
>
> Again, you are overestimating the amount of time available for such a
> project.

I agree that it won't happen overnight.  However, wouldn't it be nice to
eliminate the problem of always having to search for fonts to support some
foreign script or subset of Unicode that's not present on your system?
Just a week or two ago, a scientific publisher on the Unicode.org mailing
list expressed that lack of adequate coverage in fonts is a continuing
difficulty for their business -- and they are a big outfit which can
afford the time and money to invest in font and unicode-enabled software.
I'm sure that the Software Libre community can, and has a deep vested
interest in, solving this problem within the next 5 years ...

> > And presumably FreeType2 will have, or acquire, the smarts for
> > rendering the Arabic and Indic scripts properly.
>
> No.  This has to be done one level higher.
>
>     Werner
>