Re: ANN: back-art resources 0.1.1

[Alexander Malmberg]

Kazunobu Kuriyama wrote:
[snip]
> It would also be nice for non-European users if GNUstep allows them to
> specify
> multiple system fonts, one for displaying the Latin characters, and the
> rest for
> the characters of their native language. (I'm not sure if this makes
> sense for the
> backends other than -xlib.)

It does, but in a different way. :)

As I understand it, when you use xlib, you might have several versions
of a font with different encodings, but although they may cover many
characters together, they're separate fonts, so it's hard to get at all
the glyphs. This is something that could be fixed inside back-xlib,
though.

The mapping from unicode characters to glyphs is done by the backend.
Currently -xlib uses the default mapping (~glyph=unicode character), but
if you wanted to, you could store an "encoding index" and a glyph index
in each NSGlyph and use all encoding variants that way.

You'd still have the problem that back-art has, though: most fonts
aren't full unicode fonts. :) Automatic font fallback in case a font
doesn't have a glyph for a character might be useful, but it needs to be
properly investigated if this is something that should be done
automatically, and if so, how and where. Either way, it's an issue at
the layout manager/typesetter/text storage level, not the NSFont level.

- Alexander Malmberg