Re: [g-i] fonts: a few thoughts
Hi,
At 2 Dec 05 16:28:02 GMT,
Davide Viti wrote:
> after asking around IRC and doing a few experiments, I'd like
> to discuss about fonts for the g-i.
> As described in [1], we mainly need to
>
> * fix some issues (i.e #341229 for Arabic)
> * do the best selection for every language
> * reduce the size of fonts
>
> I did some experiments with Arabic fonts after we discussed [2]: I
> used fontforge ([3]) to remove "by hand" arabic glyps from
> FreeSerif.ttf, and tried the mini.iso: the installer picked some better
> fonts for Arabic text (and size was about 20kb smaller) So my idea was
> to use the scripting language of fontforge to strip the unneeded glyphs
> from fonts files at build time; something like mklibs (mkfonts?)
> My rough idea was , for each language, to have an entry containing something
> like:
IMHO it's hard to find which characters are needed at d-i build time.
Making font udeb file is better, I think.
> language:font_file:unicode_ranges
>
> i.e:
> ar:ae_Tholoth.ttf:range
>
> While reporting this on debian-boot, Kenshi Muto told me about a
> tool [4] he's developing along with Hideaki Iwai which goal is the
> same; I took a look and apparently granularity is even more accurate:
> it selects the needed chars by exploring po files.
Finally we (Sorry, I mistook my friend name, 'Hidetaka') created
ttf-compact-fonts package. This source package produces
ttf-compact-fonts-udeb.udeb.
deb http://kmuto.jp/debian/mtu unstable main
deb-src http://kmuto.jp/debian/mtu unstable main
Pool is: http://kmuto.jp/debian/mtu/pool/main/t/ttf-compact-fonts/
I got needed character information from d-i/packages/po,
console-data/debian/po and eject/debian/po.
Currently this udeb has only Japanese, Chinese, and Korean fonts, but
it's easy to support other languages and fonts.
I didn't unify each fonts to one TTF, because each font shapes are
completely various and CJK has character mapping confliction.
Thanks,
--
Kenshi Muto
kmuto@debian.org
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