Re: [vile] vile-9.8h

[Thomas Dickey]

On Mon, Aug 13, 2012 at 11:09:39AM +0100, Chris Green wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 13, 2012 at 05:37:21AM -0400, Thomas Dickey wrote:
> > 
> > > In my terminal (not xterm) windows I get to use fonts like "DejaVu Sans
> > > Mono" which are much, much easier on the eye than the Lucida Sans and
> > > such available in xvile.  Basically I think my terminal allows me to use
> > > truetype fonts whereas xvile doesn't.  I think xterm has the same
> > > limitations as xvile.
> > 
> > sure - neither does fontsets (splicing together fonts at runtime).
> > 
> Yes, of course, that was the 'selling point' of trutype fonts originally
> wasn't it?  You only needed to distrubute/install one file for a font
> rather than the 'old' way of a file per font size.  Inevitably that
> means that the application has to do more work by sizing the font
> itself.

It also does work by using fontsets - for practical purposes "none"(*) of
the TrueType fonts you're likely to use covers more than a few hundred
of the glyphs used across the Unicode range.  So they're spliced together
at runtime.  The one positive thing to say about fontsets with TrueType
fonts is that the pieces _are_ scalable, so if they happen to have
compatible styles, they can be made to fit together.

(*) there are of course huge, special-purpose fonts for East Asian character
    sets - and unsurprisingly those tend to have poor coverage of European
    languages.

...anyway, the discussion was good to remind me that I ought to be working
on this...

-- 
Thomas E. Dickey <address@hidden>
http://invisible-island.net
ftp://invisible-island.net

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