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

[Vadim Plessky]

On Friday 04 October 2002 6:51 pm, Edward H Trager wrote:
[...]
|  >
|  > 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

Font of very good quality are available from Adobe and Linotype.
But those fonts cost money, for sure.
So I think that "scientific publisher" doesn's tell the truth to you/to the 
list.
Let's also clarify a few things here.
Do you speak about CJK fonts, or about Latin+Greek+Cyrillic fonts, right?
There are some rather good fonts available *for free* for Latin+Greek+Cyrillic 
alphabet. And I am working on set of my own fonts (Latin+Cyrillic, Greek can 
follow, as it's not extremly difficult to add if you have already Cyrillic 
glyphs)
But, frankly, I do not care about Chineese/Korean/Japaneese glyphs.
If someone from those countries is interested - he should tsrt to working on 
them.
But so far we have a very few subscribers (on <ft-devel> ML, or on several 
other mailing lits I am subscribed to) from China/Japan/Korea.
And AFAIK none of those develops free fonts (but some develop commercial ones)


|  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.

I am wondering *how important* those Arabic and Indic scripts?
While there is a certan number of people living in those countries, I doubt 
that they have a lot of computers, and nuymbe rof *Linux* users from that 
number is quaestionable, too.
And when those things happen to change - we will see some people willing to 
contribute to free fonts for those languages. But this won't happen 
tomorrow...

|
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Cheers,
-- 

Vadim Plessky
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