From: Daniel Stenberg <daniel_at_haxx.se>
Date: Tue, 25 Jun 2002 13:18:12 +0200 (MET DST)

On Mon, 24 Jun 2002, Greg Haerr wrote:

> I volunteered to do some work on the font code. Basically, the following
> were some of the ideas for improvement. Most all the code is already
> written, I'll use code from Microwindows.

Nothing's like that warm fuzzy feeling you get from code re-use... :-)

> 1. Easily support changing between different font glyphs (Latin-1, chinese,
> korean, japanese, etc) We will need some thought in the Rockbox-internal
> method of handling unicode indices (I suggest UTF-8 for no change required,
> I still need input on how the ID3 tags support unicode)

Let me quote from the id3v2 doc I found here:
http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/id3lib/id3lib/doc/id3v2.3.0.html

(from section "3.3 ID3v2 frame overview")

"If nothing else is said a string is represented as ISO-8859-1 characters in
the range $20 - $FF. Such strings are represented as <text string>, or <full
text string> if newlines are allowed, in the frame descriptions. All Unicode
strings use 16-bit unicode 2.0 (ISO/IEC 10646-1:1993, UCS-2). Unicode strings
must begin with the Unicode BOM ($FF FE or $FE FF) to identify the byte
order."

> 2. Support converting any freely-available BDF font (from any X
> distribution) for use in rockbox.

That sounds awfully cool! I'm not sure exactly how useful that is though, as
most of those fonts will be too big... ;-)

> I have been a little concerned with the use and need for special characters
> that aren't likely to be found in "standard" Latin-1 fonts.

I don't think this is a concern for us at all.

> The easiest solution to this would be for the rockbox UI guys to come up
> with a list of required symbols and put all of them in a special-purpose
> BDF font, which can then be used along with the user-changeable BDF fonts.

Such symbols are already used now, but they are not part of any charset. We
can use simple bitmaps/icons.

> There is some issue with regards to character height, however.

You mean in your code or in the current code? Currently we only support 16
pixels high charsets (and incidently, that's the largest font we have atm). I
really can't see the need for much larger fonts either...

-- 
  Daniel Stenberg -- Rocking the box => http://bjorn.haxx.se/rockbox/

Received on 2002-06-25