Font questions

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kilaueabart

Font questions

Posted on: 2010/5/15 4:27 #1

Just popping in

I'm curious about fonts in AmiCygnix.

There's a Character Map in Accessories, with strange fonts for languages I've never heard of, like Gujarati and Gurmukhi. It has thousands of Chinese characters (how does one find the one he wants, I wonder) and both Japanese kanas. But there's no Korean.

I've poked around a bit in AmiCygnix, and have found at least two drawers called "fonts/," but nothing with the kind of files I imagine would be necessary for all Character Map can do.

A couple days ago, I wanted to make a document with AbiWord. It was an invoice, so I wanted to have numbers lined up vertically. I looked for a non-proportional font but found none in the rather short list of available fonts, so I ended up using FinalWriter (and Courier) after all.

But surely there is a way to add fonts to AbiWord? And possibly to "Character Map?

cygnusEd

Re: Font questions

Posted on: 2010/5/15 10:59 #2

Quite a regular

@kilaueabart

By default fonts in AmiCygnix are stored in:

Cygnix:CygnixPPC/share/fonts
Cygnix:CygnixPPC/local/share/fonts
Cygnix:Home/root/.fonts

While installation the truetype fonts from "Sys:Fonts/_TrueType" are copied to "Cygnix:CygnixPPC/share/fonts", so these fonts (DejaVu and Vera) are also available. The "Mono" versions of these fonts have fixed width!

If you want to install own fonts, please copy them to "Cygnix:Home/root/.fonts" and call the script "Cygnix:S/Utilities/Refresh-Font-Caches.bat" - that's all. They should also be visible in "Character Map".

The languages you see there, are the character sets included in the selected font (Selected in the top left chooser).

kilaueabart

Re: Font questions

Posted on: 2010/5/16 1:59 #3

Just popping in

@cygnusEd

Quote:

cygnusEd wrote:
@kilaueabart

By default fonts in AmiCygnix are stored in:

Cygnix:CygnixPPC/share/fonts
Cygnix:CygnixPPC/local/share/fonts
Cygnix:Home/root/.fonts

Those are the "fonts" folders I had found.

Quote:

While installation the truetype fonts from "Sys:Fonts/_TrueType" are copied to "Cygnix:CygnixPPC/share/fonts", so these fonts (DejaVu and Vera) are also available. The "Mono" versions of these fonts have fixed width!

So that's what "Mono" means! I think I used to know that.

I could have used AbiWord after all.

But I consider this strange, in light of what you say about installation. Cygnix:CygnixPPC/share/fonts/truetype contains 40 files, including fonts.cache-1; 21 flavors of DejaVu, ten of Vera , and eight of Free. Meanwhile Sys:Fonts/_TrueType contains 109 files, no Free included. I must have messed up installation somehow. But I can call up a number of TrueType font files with either Character Map or AbiWord that aren't in CygnixPPC/Share/fonts, but are in Sys:fonts/_TrueType...

Quote:

If you want to install own fonts, please copy them to "Cygnix:Home/root/.fonts" and call the script "Cygnix:S/Utilities/Refresh-Font-Caches.bat" - that's all. They should also be visible in "Character Map".

The languages you see there, are the character sets included in the selected font (Selected in the top left chooser).

I think I now remember you telling me how to add fonts before. It's probably still within reach on this list, and that's presumably why I can write Chinese characters with AbiWord.

But your final paragraph above seems to imply that BitStream Vera Sans contains Gurmukhi (whatever that is) because I can set the font to the former and view the latter. Why would BitStream Vera have such a quaint font?

varmfskii

Re: Font questions

Posted on: 2010/5/16 16:31 #4

Just popping in

@kilaueabart

Quote:

kilaueabart wrote:
It has thousands of Chinese characters (how does one find the one he wants, I wonder) and both Japanese kanas. But there's no Korean.

If you look around enough it should have the Korean. As for entering Chinese you need some sort for IME (Input Method Editor) for any computer system. Every one I have ever dealt with is to some extent menu driven.

cygnusEd

Re: Font questions

Posted on: 2010/5/16 22:52 #5

Quite a regular

@kilaueabart

Quote:

But I consider this strange, in light of what you say about installation. Cygnix:CygnixPPC/share/fonts/truetype contains 40 files, including fonts.cache-1; 21 flavors of DejaVu, ten of Vera , and eight of Free. Meanwhile Sys:Fonts/_TrueType contains 109 files, no Free included.

While installation, only DejaVu and Vera fonts are copied, none of the others!! These fonts are the most important fonts for AmiCygnix. If the user wants wants fonts, he must install them by himself.

Quote:

But your final paragraph above seems to imply that BitStream Vera Sans contains Gurmukhi (whatever that is) because I can set the font to the former and view the latter. Why would BitStream Vera have such a quaint font?

A truetype font has special areas for special characters. Sometimes it is not enough only to select the desired charset (e.g. ISO-8859-1), you need a so called "input method" to get the desired characters while typing in a text. GTK2 has such a feature: Click the right mouse button in a text field and have a look at menu item "Input Methods". In the current AmiCygnix release only the standard GTK+ methods are active. This means: No korean input method (You need "Hangul" for korean - right?). Also the current release of AbiWord has no compiled in Hangul input module.

All programs released after AbiWord do have additional compiled in modules for hangul, greek and others. But they must be activated in the GTK2 settings. If you want to test these new features, just send me a mail

kilaueabart

Re: Font questions

Posted on: 2010/5/18 3:29 #6

Just popping in

@varmfskii

Quote:

varmfskii wrote:
@kilaueabart

If you look around enough it should have the Korean. As for entering Chinese you need some sort for IME (Input Method Editor) for any computer system. Every one I have ever dealt with is to some extent menu driven.

I installed my Korean faults in .../.fonts/ right after posting the above. A huge file during which I had to "Retry" Read/Write block errors three times!

I am unaware of an IME for the Amiga side (including AmiCygnix). Whenever I need to do much Japanese, I boot up Lenny. That used to be every day, but it's probably down to less than once a week now, thanks to AmiCygnix's programs at least allowing me to read CJK.

But I can write Chinese characters in Sylpheed by first writing them with AbiWord (easier than with Character Map, for some reason) and then copying and pasting.

Not much fun poking through several thousand characters--fortunately they are in order--, but about 12 years ago I wrote a sort of "pseudo-IME" on my A2K which allowed me to type in Japanese words and convert them to JIS code. I'm now thinking of rewriting that for Unicode.

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