Rockbox

  • Status Unconfirmed
  • Percent Complete
    0%
  • Task Type Patches
  • Category User Interface → Font/charset
  • Assigned To No-one
  • Operating System All players
  • Severity Low
  • Priority Very Low
  • Reported Version Daily build (which?)
  • Due in Version Undecided
  • Due Date Undecided
  • Votes
  • Private
Attached to Project: Rockbox
Opened by wpyh - 2008-05-31

FS#9059 - WenQuanYi Unibit font

This font is part of the WenQuanYi Project at [1]. It’s in Chinese, but there’s an english page at [2].

I’m adding this font because:
1. Currently there is no good Chinese font for Rockbox.
2. The best Chinese font (unifont) has unevenly sized Chinese characters, while this font has uniformly sized Chinese characters.

The attachments contain screenshots of the simulator, to show how this font would look like on the iPod Nano. I’ve also attached a screenshot using the Unifont font to show the uneven sizes of Chinese characters, for comparison. I don’t know about other languages, but I’d think other CJK languages work better in this font as well, due to the merging of WenQuanYi Bitmap Song.

According to the project[3], this font is made by combining the GNU Unifont (GPL), WenQuanYi Bitmap Song (GPL) and Fixed-16×8 (Public Domain) fonts. The maintainer of GNU Unifont also acknowledges this fact at [4].

This font is licensed under the GPLv2 with a font embedding exception[3]:

[quote]
** GPL v2 license with font embedding exception:

As a special exception, if you create a document which uses this
font, and embed this font or unaltered portions of this font into
the document, this font does not by itself cause the resulting
document to be covered by the GNU General Public License. This
exception does not however invalidate any other reasons why the
document might be covered by the GNU General Public License. If you
modify this font, you may extend this exception to your version of
the font, but you are not obligated to do so. If you do not wish to
do so, delete this exception statement from your version.
[/quote]

I don’t mind either way, but it would be up to Rockbox developers whether to strip off this exception. And either way, the font is compatible with Rockbox’s license (GPLv2).

The font I’m attaching is a modified version (and only the bdf); you can download the original version from [5]. My modification is:

— wqy-unibit.bdf.orig 2008-06-01 04:47:36.839752214 +0800
+++ wqy-unibit.bdf 2008-06-01 05:01:51.031748178 +0800
@@ -64,7 +64,7 @@
CHARSET_ENCODING “-1” CHARSET_COLLECTIONS “ASCII ISO8859-5 GB2312.1980 BIG5-0 KSC5601.1989-0 JISX0208.1997 ISO10646-1” ENDPROPERTIES
-CHARS 46443
+CHARS 46444
STARTCHAR uni0000
ENCODING 0
SWIDTH 500 0

This is because convbdf will emit a warning “Warning: DWIDTH spec > max FONTBOUNDINGBOX” when converting the font. This is because there are actually 46444 STARTCHAR entries, but only 46443 glyphs – the character “mu” is encoded as 181 and 956, with the exact same glyph. The generated .fnt file is exactly the same with or without my modification.

Additionally, this font is quite big so it’s a bit big on the screen of the iPod Nano. But it would be great on larger screens. Please take a look at the screenshots in the attachments.

Links:
[1] http://www.wenq.org/ [2] http://wqy.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/enindex.cgi [3] http://www.wenq.org/index.cgi?Unibit_README [4] http://www.unifoundry.com/unifont.html [5] http://downloads.sourceforge.net/wqy/wqy-unibit-bdf-1.1.0-1.tar.gz?use_mirror=osdn

Loading...

Available keyboard shortcuts

Tasklist

Task Details

Task Editing