Hi Jerome,
as you want to minimize disk usage beyond the already space efficient compressed CPI format "CPX", how about this idea: Make a list of all codepages supported by the installer and read all fonts for those. Because most fonts will be created from common ancestors, only modifying a few accented chars, you should get a reasonably small set of characters. Assuming that all messages used by the installer only use a lot less than the 256 different characters of each codepage, the whole ACTIVE set is likely to be below 256 or at least below 512 different characters. Then merge all those into ONE font and use THAT font, together with the raw Unicode version of your message strings, to display text in all languages. You can of course also use mappings from codepage to unicode to "512font" to keep the message files small (1 byte per char, not UTF-8) because you know for each file which codepage it uses :-) Similar things exist in Unicode-aware editors for DOS, but my suggestion would be far more lightweight: It would use actual text mode (in VGA: up to 512 chars) and you could take care that most of 7-bit ASCII stays untouched for best compatibility while working with messages and files in non-codepage context. In any case it would be interesting to count how many distinct characters the whole installer is likely to encounter at all :-) And the common ancestor assumption will make it a lot easier to know which char shapes to include from which codepage and which not to include. The "one font for all" approach would still get the common ancestor included as well, but I think that is GOOD because you get a consistent font style. When you mix a BIOS font with only a few accented chars taken from codepage fonts, for comparison, you are likely to get a somewhat jumpy style for the text. I hope this was thought-inspiring and not too long to read :-) Eric PS: VGA 512 char mode uses one of the color bits as the 9th bit of the characters, I think the blink or the brightness bit :-) _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
