On Sat, 9 Aug 2003, Jungshik Shin wrote:
> On Fri, 8 Aug 2003, Pablo Saratxaga wrote:
> > That being said, it would be nice to have the ability to do
> > user-configuration
> > of glyph substitutions in gtk2; eg telling that when a given font XXXX is
> > choosen, then characters of range 0x00-0xff should be ignored, and taken
> > from font YYYY instead. The ascii range of some CJK fonts is simply
> > too ugly... or even bugged in some cases.
>
> That doesn't need to be that complex. Simply allowing CSS-style
> fontlist is more than enough. That is, offering a UI for specifying an
> _ordered_ list of fonts (instead of just one font, generic or specific)
> should work well. That is, by putting a good Latin(-only) font, a
> Cyrillic(-only) font, and a Greek(-only) font before a CJK font followed
> by a generic font (e.g. Serif), you can get the best of all fonts.
> This UI needs to be a part of the system-wide 'control panel'.
I have to correct myself. This does not work well when font selection
is done in tandem with 'lang' ('lang' given a very large weight) and
_without_ actually going through a run of text to render, which is often
the case.
What you described may be necessary in the following scenario. Suppose we
specify "Courier, MingLiu' for a block of text marked as 'zh-TW'. Because
Latin letters in CJK fonts are not so good, we specify 'Courier' before
'MingLiu' expecting Latin letters to be rendered by Courier and Chinese
characters to be rendered by MingLiu[1]. If the font selection is made
solely based on the font list (ordered) and lang. (with 'lang' given a
large weight), only 'MingLiu' would be selected because 'zh-TW' is not
covered by Courier. As a result, all characters end up being rendered by
MingLiu. Char-by-char font selection doesn't have this problem. However,
it's likely to be slower. Going through a run of text before choosing
a font/a set of fonts may work better but it may be even slower. Staying
in a single font as long as possible is another possibility.
Of course, if 'lang' is not taken into account and just the ordered
list of fonts is used in glyph/font search, we'd not have the above
problem. On the other hand, unless the font list is carefully selected,
one may get ransom-note style rendering in some cases.
Jungshik
[1] In some case, exactly the opposite is desired under the premise that
glyphs of Latin letters in a CJK font are designed to match well with
CJK characters in the font. This works well just as it is now.
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