Re: fonts for gfxmenu, help needed

[Felix Zielcke]

Am Mittwoch, den 25.11.2009, 23:38 -0500 schrieb Qianqian Fang:
> hi list
> 
> My friend brought me attention to this thread, and
> I am very glad to see a better CJK support is now
> on the agenda of grub. As a Chinese font developer,
> I am willing to help, share information or build
> fonts for this specific need.
> 
> I wasn't really following how fonts were used in grub,
> and still had the (wrong) impression that only 256
> glyphs are allowed for each file. After opening the
> overlay_2009-07-19 tarball, I saw large files such as
> unifont are included, so, I guess now grub is able
> to handle the full unicode (or BMP) fonts including
> CJK ones, is this correct? do they have to be bitmaps?

Even with the old .pff font format the whole unicode was possible but it
was just slow IIRC.
At least it was slow with first version of .pf2 or grub-mkfont.
The .pf2 format itself is bitmap but see below. As input for grub-mkfont
they can be TTF.

> If the answers to my above questions are "yes", then
> I think you may consider a customized version
> of "WenQuanYi Bitmap Song" [1], which is a multi-strike
> bitmap font containing >27000 Chinese Han glyphs
> at 9pt,10pt,10.5pt,11pt and 12pt sizes. The Latin
> part of this font are not "monospaced", but we
> can either merge it with other mono Latin fonts
> (GPL compatible), or use fallback to get around it.
> 
> I saw you already have the later version of
> GNU Unifont installed, if that's the case, then
> you can skip the 12pt of WenQuanYi Bitmap Song,
> because most of the CJK glyphs in Unifont 5.1
> were ported from WQY's bitmap font last year by
> Paul Hardy [2].

Yes in the Debian/Ubuntu packages we use Paul Hardy's version.

> About format, I don't know if you can use ttf
> file, or SFNT ttf file (with only embedded bitmaps).
> WQY Bitmap Song has an SFNT TTF version [3]. It appears
> that freetype2 works fine with it, but fontconfig
> has difficulties. Using SFNT TTF, the uncompressed
> font size is about 3M (with 9,10,11,12pt),which
> is fairly lightweight.
> 
> If grub happens to be able to process vector
> ttf fonts, I would recommend DroidSansFallback [4]
> or the derived WenQuanYi Micro Hei [5]. They both
> covers a huge span of languages, and the second one
> have a lot more CJK glyphs and both proportional
> and monospaced species.

As input format for grub-mkconf we support everything libfreetype
supports, so TTF too.

> Please let me know if you have any further comments,
> 
> Qianqian


-- 
Felix Zielcke
Proud Debian Maintainer and GNU GRUB developer