Re: Adding Fonts

Hi David,


> I may be making a mistake in trying to get 11.3.1 to operate under Windows
> 7, but it seems to want to, and I can't find anything on the Web site that
> talks about the issues.

To crawl for potential issues and or support, I'd suggest taking a
look at the open issues [1] in the bug tracker and searching within
the mailing list archives [2]. ;-)


> The one problem is getting it to use my ttf fonts.  Having been around
> several times with the instructions on the Web site, I get nowhere, still
> the obstinate times/arial/courier choices, coming from who knows where,
> since removing the font config files from the config directory seems to make
> no difference.

I recall a couple recent threads about this in the mailing list. I
don't recall if there was feedback from the Amaya development team
regarding this, but the idea here is to help the user produce pages
which are more standard, cross-browser and cross-platform. Using
certain fonts doesn't play very well with that, so Amaya limits to the
(probably) most deployed set of fonts... ;-)

Note that, if you manually specify a font using CSS, the information
will be saved along with the file and will appear in other browsers
(such as Firefox). But, AFAIK, Amaya won't render that font
information. For example, try this:
1. Select a piece of text;
2. Press the "CSS" button";
3. In the "Characters" tab, "font-family" input, type "Pristina,Lucida
Calligraphy,cursive" (without the quotes);
4. Save the file and open it with Firefox.

You should now be able to see the selected font rendering as expected.
Amaya won't display it, though... Also, if you take this suggestion to
a practical level, make sure you to two things:
* Try adding a set of fonts instead a single one: that will cause the
browser to fallback to similar looking fonts whenever your favorite
one isn't available (for example, I believe "Pristina" is probably
only available in Windows Vista/7);
* Always add a generic font family [3] as the last item of your font
list: that will provide meta-information so the browser can use a
similar font if the set of provided font names isn't available. ;-)


> My install is not on the C drive, by preference, though I tried it that way
> with a default install and got nowhere with the fonts either.  It may all be
> my mistake, or it may be that Windows 7 has been changed around so that
> Amaya is lost.  I would appreciate any words of wisdom on the subject; I
> only just started trying to use Amaya, so don't have experience under other
> operating systems to compare.  I'm impressed with the application, but
> really need those other fonts.

I don't think Amaya is confused.

Note that I still mostly see this as a feature over a bug/limitation.
Historically, authors have misused (TTF) fonts to do semantically
wrong stuff such as using Windings to insert symbols. If one intends
to do such "tricks", I recommend using Unicode characters (search for
them [4] if you don't know which one!) and, if/when they don't appear
due to lack of browser/font support (Internet Explorer fails with some
basic characters), use small pictures instead. Inserting a "T" and
expecting that to display a snowflake is just broken IMO... :-(

If you "really need those other fonts" for other effects than the
described, then please reply back with a more clear explanation on you
use-case(s) so the community and/or development team can better
understand what's intended. ;-)


Hope this helps,
 Helder


[1] http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/buglist.cgi?product=Amaya&bug_status=__open__
[2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-amaya/
[3] http://www.w3.org/Style/Examples/007/fonts
[4] http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/search.htm

Received on Tuesday, 16 February 2010 10:57:42 UTC