Re: fonts for gfxmenu, help needed

[Michal Suchanek]

2009/11/27 Qianqian Fang <address@hidden>:
> Michal Suchanek wrote:
>>
>> Grub is capable of displaying variable width fonts but monospace fonts
>> may be preferred for some uses.
>> Ideally grub should use as few fonts as possible so a font with both
>> CJK glyphs and Latin glyphs is preferable.
>> As you pointed out the glyphs in Unifont are mostly ported from wqy
>> fonts so unifont would be one such font.
>> We may need a special font for Japanese and a method to load different
>> primary font when displaying the grub menu in Japanese is desired or
>> extend grub to support combining variant marks.
>>
>> Unfortunately, unifont is only provided in single variant and size
>> which is most troublesome in my view.
>> I expect that theme authors would want at least two font variants
>> (Song, Hei) and some larger font sizes for captions or displaying
>> simple few line menu on high resolution screens.
>>
>
> ok, I think I am getting clear now. Grub can load pan-unicode
> (1-bit) bitmap fonts of various sizes. Grub needs 1) good bitmap
> fonts with CJK coverage (and possibility Latin) at multiple
> point sizes, 2) preferably with Song and Hei styles as well as
> 3) Han glyph CJK variant support.

Grub currently does not support glyph variants. The best we can do to
render Japanese properly without much additional works is to load a
different font when the menu is supposed to be in Japanese.

>
> Personally, I would rank the likelihood of the above
> goals in 1>3>2. Basically, for #1, WQY Bitmap Song (xfonts-wqy
> in Debian/Ubuntu) is what you are looking for (together
> with GNU unifont).
>
> For #2, it depends on how grub handles language and fallback
> and does need a lot of cautions, otherwise, it can be a pain.
> AFAIK, there are not many good free Japanese bitmap fonts
> covers the 9~12pt ranges. Mplus [1] bitmaps have OK quality,
> but only have 8pt and 9pt (8pt is not a readable size); then
> efonts [2], xfonts-intl-japanese, GNU intlfonts [3] and
> HabianCJK [4] contain pretty much the same set of low-quality
> Kanji bitmaps at 9pt, 10.5pt, 18pt and 24px, where IMHO,
> the 9pt and 10.5pt are rather not readable; 18pt is sort of
> ok, but wider than GNU unifont by 1px.

Thanks for these tips. I guess wider by one px is acceptable for an
alternate font, the fonts need not be displayed both at the same time.
I am not sure if lower quality glyphs of correct shape are preferred
over higher quality Chinese glyphs, though. I guess it would also
depend on reader preference but it would be nice to hear the opinion
of somebody familiar with Japanese.

>
> If you really want to include Japanese bitmaps, you may
> also try to convert DroidSansJapanese [5]. But I think it
> needs a lot of fine tuning in order to get the rasterized
> glyphs readable.
>
> For #3, it is difficult, and probably not necessary. The
> differences between Song/Mincho and Hei/Gothic is rather
> not distinguishable in screen sizes. You have to get above
> 20pt to see differences (which is largely weight different).
> We call WQY bitmap song, but truly, it is not really the Song
> style, because we eliminated all the serif due to small space.

For me the Song/Mincho variant fonts seem more readable at small
sizes. Although the serifs aren't clearly visible they often add
weight to the stroke ends and make them easier to recognize. However,
this may be matter of preference/reader familiarity with the
language/overall font quality/...

I think that there is not much need for smaller fonts than the default
16px/12pt Unifont. It would be nice addition to have a font for
fine-print but I am personally more interested in larger font sizes
for captions or simple menus on high resolution screens.

In the larger sizes the difference between different font styles is
more visible.

>
> If what you meant is to have "another style" in addition to
> what we have in GNU unifont, then, you may rasterize WQY Micro Hei [6]
> or WQY Zen Hei [7] to bitmaps, but again, I don't have faith on
> the readability of the outcome unless someone spend years
> to manually fine tune.

I guess it's OK to have only one font face in small size if there
aren't any good alternatives.
I would prefer readability over customization in this case.
For Latin multiple usable font styles exist at this size but that's
because the glyphs are much simpler and fewer so it's easier to draw
them in such constrained space.

>
>
> In summary, I think goal #1 is ready to go, #2 needs more
> input from Japanese users, and some additional work; #3
> needs a lot of work, and perhaps not really that important.
>
> Also, I want to add that Japanese people CAN read
> simplified-Chinese styled Kanji. It's not pleasant, but
> not unrecognizable (it's like simplified Chinese users
> can understand traditional Chinese, but they don't use it).

I would prefer for grub to offer the option to render each language
correctly as long as it is reasonably possible with current grub
features and available fonts.

All the additional fonts need not ship with grub. It may suffice to
document which fonts look good in grub so that distribution packagers
can use grub-mkfont to convert them on the user's machine if the fonts
are installed.

Thanks

Michal