[softwarelist] Re: Any Font thoughts please?
- From: Martin Wuerthner <public@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: davidpilling@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 24 Jan 2010 14:38:43 +0100
In message <TlcugVKeM3WLFwW3@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
David Pilling <flist@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> From the PRM (page 3-420) you should be able to tack the encoding on to
> the name of a font, I wonder if this works in something like Draw - this
> has the facility to import text files which contain things like font
> names - a text area.
Yes, Draw has no problems with encodings both in text areas but also
in normal text line objects, mainly because it simply passes on the
font name as is the FontManager. If you put a font name like
Homerton.Medium\ELatin3 into a Draw file it displays text in Latin3.
It would also work in OvationPro if you could put that font name into
an OvationPro style definition somehow. Then, you could even have
Latin1 and Latin3 in a single OvationPro file. However, if you hack a
font name like Homerton.Medium\ELatin3 into an OP document, then OP
complains that the font is not present and substitutes it. The same is
true for EasiWriter.
> Otherwise one is left wondering how Acorn tested the ability to use
> encodings in font names.
The FontManager has had full support for encodings since RISC OS 3.1.
Testing that is no problem. A BASIC two-liner can display fonts in
various encodings just fine. Or, see my XChars application.
> What we really want, is something that sits on a vector and glues the
> encoding on to the font name before the Font_FindFont SWI gets hold of
> it, thus allowing use in any program - nice idea for you Martin...
Well, that is not really an option because it would do just the same
as the global alphabet switch, which we already have. What we really
want is that applications no longer ask for fonts without encodings.
The ability to do that is really a RISC OS 2 fallback. Ever since RISC
OS 3.1, applications should have been encodings aware and they should
have been passing font names with encodings to the FontManager.
Otherwise, how can you make sure that your document looks the same on
some other machine? Currently, all word processor documents display
differently if you switch the global alphabet. That was not the
original idea.
The whole problem has only arisen because the user base was so much UK
centric that users never really asked for that in large numbers. It is
fairly trivial for applications to support mixed encodings documents.
That said, neither ArtWorks nor EasiWriter do, but then, hardly anyone
ever asked for it anyway and nowadays we would of course be better off
if we jumped to Unicode directly, even more so as we finally have
solid Unicode PostScript printing abilities with the PS3 driver.
Martin
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