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Rockbox mail archiveSubject: Re: Different charsets, loadable fonts, unicode ....Re: Different charsets, loadable fonts, unicode ....
From: Greg Haerr <greg_at_censoft.com>
Date: Mon, 15 Jul 2002 07:36:21 -0700 : What tool is used to compile BDF fonts to PCF? How small do PCF files typically get? There's a tool with the X11 distribution that does it. I'm going to port it to Microwindows and I'll then send you a copy. The PCF files are smaller than BDF, but they still contain more information than we'll want in the rockbox project. As a result, X11 typically compresses them as font.pcf.gz, which requires the zlib library to read them in. Take a look at your /usr/lib/X11/fonts/misc directory to get an idea of how big they get compressed. : This is a good feature that I want included. I just want to make sure we select the right approach beforing adding a lot of code. Here are the major issues I see that need to be addressed before writing too much code: 1. Unicode support. Can rockbox run with just unicode, or are we going to have to support code pages? Alex said that he had to use 3 different fonts in order to properly handle the ID3 tags. Also, apparently they weren't encoded in unicode, but I haven't got a clear answer on that. If rockbox can run with just unicode, I strongly suggest we use the minimal information that I proposed we pull from BDF fonts, into a file format slightly enhanced from Alex's contribution. With this design, all application software for rockbox would just use unicode, and not care which font was used. (the application API would use a "LoadFont()" call that would load a standard font for the UI, and could auto-load others based on ID3 tags. The internal font layout doesn't take up much space, we get to use any BDF font, and we get proportional fonts. We don't actually have to have loadable fonts, the system could easily just use selected compiled-in fonts, as well. I've got code that will convert any BDF font to a C structure. If rockbox must use codepage support, then we could still go with compiled-in or loadable fonts, but there will need to be some other method of adjusting the UI code to know about the font encoding. Regards, Greg Received on 2002-07-15 Page template was last modified "Tue Sep 7 00:00:02 2021" The Rockbox Crew -- Privacy Policy |