Sugar's fonts

[Yuan Chao]

Sorry forgot to include devel at lists.laptop.org.

On 9/29/07, Yuan Chao <yuanchao at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 9/29/07, Albert Cahalan <acahalan at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > You can try to view google news Taiwan edition to test. The current
> > It looks unreadable to me, which is normal for Chinese. :-)
> > I can't seem to find a font size that will make it readable.
> Indeed, the problem is that the strokes of this font (serif typeface)
> is simply too thin for XO. (for its high res. and special pixel
> layout) It helps if you change to reflect screen mode. A free
> sans-serif typeface is needed for better readability. This is what
> Arne is working on: a free "hei-ti" (black) type face truetype font.
>
> > > font size in web activity is ok to me. But the performance needs to be
> > > much more improved.
> > Font glyph caching is probably disabled for CJK.
> > I know I've seen that in one of the common libraries.
> > (don't remember: Pango, SDL_ttf, FreeType, etc.)
> AFAIK, the current lib. used in Web activity is Pango that uses cairo
> to render the fonts. To have better performance, up to 256 glyphs are
> cached. However, this is far too few for CJK environment. A typical
> case for traditional Chinese, there are around 6000 daily used
> characters, ~3000 for simplified Chinese and ~2000 for Japanese Kanji.
> (of course they won't show up at the same time on every pages.) An
> ideal way to handle this is to let bottom layer lib. (freetype, x11)
> to handle the font rendering which is the which is the way used prior
> Fedora Core 5. (I'm not an expert here.)
>
> > With something like 30000 characters, glyph caching
> > eats up lots of memory. Perhaps there is a cache size
> Surely they should not all be cached. The present font cache seems to
> be just a walk-around instead of a real solution to me. The current
> web activity even sometimes encounter bad performance on western
> contents.
>
> > The problem with serifs is that they often should be smaller
> > than a pixel for typical screen and font sizes. Well, that is
> > not generally possible, so one gets serifs that are way too big.
> > The extra resolution of the XO might make serifs more desirable
> > than they would be on regular PC hardware.
> Sure. But only in reflective mono mode.
>
> > > For Chinese, so called "black" face is the corresponding one to "sans"
> > > face. However, the current available (free) one is not very complete.
> > What about the whole bold/italic/underline issue?
> > I guess you have bold. Italic and underline could be used,
> > but aren't the norm AFAIK. (really weird if you go vertical)
> > Would you want endcaps (square/round) to be adjustable?
> Yes, I can use bold/italic/underline, but they are not "standard"
> Chinese way of writing. :) The bold/italic/underline "effect" of
> Chinese characters is available till very late. For certain softwares
> we even need some special patches. And surely no for vertical way of
> writings. The endcaps you mean is for the end of strokes? They are
> actually refer to two type faces: square -> "hei-ti" (black), round ->
> "yuan-ti". Arne's WIP fonts will provide both as they are based on a
> existing stroke based database. However, some manual fine tunings are
> still necessary. That's why it takes time and the work can hardly be
> shared in order to have a unified result.
>
> > Line-to-line spacing is an issue when moving the eyes
> > from the end of one line to the beginning of the next.
> > I've seen kids have trouble with this. Big letters increase
> > line-to-line spacing as a side effect; one could instead
> > just increase the line-to-line spacing. So I'm suggesting
> > that one distinguish line-to-line spacing from character
> > height in testing. Excessive line length probably also
> > makes things more difficult because the eye must travel
> > more to get back to the beginning of a line.
> That's also a good way to try. I don't know how it affects Chinese
> reading as we have one character for one word. Surely more clear
> strokes help on reading. Maybe that's why the new vista "gothic"
> (black) type face for Japanese is called "Meiryo" which means "clear
> to understand".
>
>
> --
> Best regards,
> Yuan Chao
>


-- 
Best regards,
Yuan Chao