[Pkg-fonts-devel] Fwd: [ANN] New consolefonts

[Daniel Glassey]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Ken Moffat <XzarniwhoopX X_a.t._X XntlworldX X.dot.X XcomX>
Date: 07-Aug-2007 22:44
Subject: [ANN] New consolefonts
To: linux-utf8 at nl.linux.org


 People who wish to be able to read a wider range of languages on
the console (e.g. on servers, or while waiting for a build of xorg
to finish) might be interested in this.  It's a series of 8x16 psfu
fonts created from a bdf font.

 The method follows Dmitry Bolkovityanov's uni_vga (indeed, it uses
his perl script) but the base font started out as etl16.  I first
modified that to use a main format of 3 lines above the capital
letters, 10 lines for capitals, and 3 lines for descenders.  Needing
a new name for it, I noted that U+03A3 is 'Σ' and called it
sigma-consolefonts.  After a limited initial prerelease it is now
ready for its 0.1 release.

 The homepage is
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/zarniwhoop/consolefonts/sigma.html
 and there is a backup copy of the tarball at
http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/~ken/fonts/sigma-consolefonts/

 My main focus is on legibility, followed by coverage of current
languages.  These fonts are only really concerned with alphabetic
scripts, and the armenian and georgian letters (plus arabic and
hebrew) are probably unchanged from etl16.  Many of the latin,
cyrillic, and greek letters have had their forms changed.  Like
Dmitry, but unlike most console fonts, I include the bdf file (the
source, as it were) and map files. So, you can alter any letter forms
which offend you, or produce your own map with a different
combination of glyphs.  (Patches welcomed if you find errors.)

 Although there are some 256-glyph files, I prefer 512-glyph at the
expense of losing bright colours.  As with the fonts used in X, I
map latin/cyrillic/greek to the same letter where appropriate (so,
they all use the same form for 'A', unlike e.g. LatArCyrHeb.  This
not only looks better to me, it means I have more space to add other
languages.

 For most people, I will recommend my 'general' map - this should
cover all current latin-based alphabets (except some african and
vietnamese), together with the major cyrillic languages and current
greek.  There are other variations to cover african (not tremendously
useful if your language of interest needs combining diacriticals, but
hopefully ok for e.g. venda), vietnamese (proof of concept - coverage
is similar to viscii), polytonic greek, and a few others.

 The package includes a number of example files listing the
alphabets, or at least the selection of characters, which I believe
are used in various languages - these may be useful if you wish to
establish the coverage of your TrueType fonts in X.  The build
dependencies are gzip, install, make, and perl.  Tested on
linuxfromscratch, cross-lfs (with UTF-8 modifications, e.g. for
ncursesw), and debian etch.  This will be on freshmeat when it passes
their project-validation process.

 Thank you for taking the time to read this.

ĸen
--
das eine Mal als Tragödie, das andere Mal als Farce

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