Talk:Font Common Room: Difference between revisions

From OLPC
Jump to navigation Jump to search
mNo edit summary
No edit summary
 
(4 intermediate revisions by 2 users not shown)
Line 1: Line 1:
This is the area for dicsussions of the [[Font Common Room]] page.


Much of the content which was in this page previously (namely all of it except the above notes) has been moved to the new [[Fonts]] page, thereby restoring the Fonts Common Room to its intended purpose of being used for solving problems about fonts which arise in projects.
''General Note'': Most (if not all) of the people involved in these pages they do so out of their free time and because they enjoy doing it. It's fun. These pages are being developed and are work in progress. If you have a comment, make it in a civilised and modern manner. Read more about [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki what a Wiki is].

The following paragraph was moved here from the [[Font Common Room]] page. It refers to the section that talks about fontconfig (sans, serif, monospace), etc.

:This entire discussion seems to be ignorant of the development work that has been done, outside of the Linux community, in developping Unicode fonts. The prime example is [http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&item_id=Gentium Gentium] which covers most of the scripts needed. Any work in improving coverage should add glyphs to existing Unicode fonts like Gentium. Also, please not that concepts such as sans, serif and monospace do not exist at all in many of the world's scripts. Most scripts also do not have upper/lower case distinctions.

:Please spend your time constructively in enhancing the page to properly cover non-Latin scripts. [[User:Simosx|Simosx]] 14:51, 1 June 2006 (EDT)

:Gentium is a well-known free font, licensed with the Open Font License. It is a Serif font that covers the [http://www.unicode.org/charts full Latin Unicode block], which means it supports sufficiently Brazil and Nigeria. I do not know whether Gentium is [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Font_hinting hinted], which might be an issue when used for the User Interface. [[User:Simosx|Simosx]] 15:00, 1 June 2006 (EDT)

:Additional fonts can be used by developers by converting font outlines to SVG format and using the SVG support in the OLPC to display them. It is a nice thing to have some font variety however, it is more important to have one font that covers all the glyphs used in the target languages.[[User:Memracom]]

=== Work in progress ===
Below are some fragments that may make it in the front page.

{|border="1"
|+ Scripts in Pilot Countries
! Brazil !! China !! India !! Nigeria !! Thailand
|-
|Latin
|Tibetan བོད་ཡིག, Simplified chinese 简体字
|Bengali, Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Limbu, Malayalam, Oriya, Sinhala, Syloti Nagri, , Tamil, Telugu
|Pannigerian
|Thai
|}

=== Important issues to figure out ===
* Is there a requirement for the font to be [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Font_hinting hinted]?
* We still do not know if there is a requirement for fontconfig. This should probably come out soon.
* We do not know if there will be a requirement for the applications to be based on GTK+ 2.x/Pango
* ''add here''

The main text has the following in it:

Scripts in Pilot Countries
Not to have included a font, for normal means that the laptop is not usable for the kids in the area the script is used.

This is not a grammatical English sentence. What does it mean? What is the meaning of the list that follows the statement? Is it a good thing or a bad thing if a language is listed in the list?

Latest revision as of 16:09, 5 June 2006

Much of the content which was in this page previously (namely all of it except the above notes) has been moved to the new Fonts page, thereby restoring the Fonts Common Room to its intended purpose of being used for solving problems about fonts which arise in projects.