[haiku-commits] Re: haiku: hrev52159 - src/servers/app/font docs/interface_guidelines src/kits/network/libnetapi src/servers/app
- From: Adrien Destugues <pulkomandy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: haiku-commits@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 3 Aug 2018 08:01:13 +0200
On thu, Aug 02, 2018 at 08:19:49PM -0500, looncraz wrote:
I think we should introduce a be_half_fixed_font (or be_flex_fixed_font or
some such "full half" is not intuitive) to go with the be_fixed_font and
friends.
And Appearance should gain a friendlier name for it, such as "International
Fixed Font" or some such, allowing it to be set independently of the
standard fixed font.
Applications which are aware would use be_flex_fixed_font and unaware
applications can just use be_fixed_font.
This is not satisfying for users. Why would they work with two sets of
fixed fonts?
I see two cases:
- Either you are US American and care only about ASCII characters. Then,
you can use a full/half fixed font and never notice the difference.
- Or, you are Japanese, and you can never use a really fixed font
anyways.
I think a plain fixed font is a thing of the past. We should just drop
support for it, and applications should behave properly with a full&half
fixed font (Terminal already does, SerialConnect should be fixed, and
I'm still all hears for a more complete list of apps which even use the
fixed font at all).
It is not acceptable in 2018 to not bother about rendering Japanese
chars properly. As I already said, it would be like not supporting UTF-8
because "8 bit encodings are simpler and faster". Let's make things work
everywhere for everyone, even if that means fixing the applications.
Now, the problem is that this may break the API, because be_fixed_font
is supposed to be a really fixed font (I'm not even sure about this, I
wanted to check on my BeOS machine to see wether it allows them as
"monospace" but could not get it to boot, yet). So, we need to provide
some way for old apps to do something mostly right.
So, we can:
- Allow be_fixed_font to actually be a full&half fixed font, and maybe
deal with graphic glitches in apps which are not aware of it and rely
on a fixed font, when they try to display the full-width characters.
Note that such apps were already unable to show Japanese characters
(as no actually monospace font would properly render both Japanese and
Latin chars), replacing "tofu" (the missing char box placeholder) with
a glitchy or misaligned rendering of a character may be an improvement.
- Keep a monospace font for be_fixed_font purpose, but deprecate it.
Then it would not be user settable, support only a subset of
characters. We would introduce a be_full_half_fixed_font as a
replacement.
--
Adrien.
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