Re: Fonts for Amaya (Mac OS X)

Irene Vatton 11.09.2007 10:31:   ­  
> On Monday 10 September 2007 22:59, Leif Halvard Silli wrote:
> > Hi - in trying to put Amaya to work, we feel hampered by the somewhat
> > primitive font support.
> >
> > It seems as if Amaya doesn't support the installed fonts on my Mac.
> >
> > Is there any page somewhere that describes how one can make Amay use
> > other fonts than the built-in fonts it comes with?
> >
> > (I would actually have been satisfied, as author, with Amaya if it
> > weren't because we need to work with combining diacritica. And each time
> > I insert a combining diacritica, then Amaya - or the fonts it supports -
> > starts to render the text in very impractical ways: The insertino point
> > moves away from the "typing point" -- the insertion point looks as if it
> > is placed 1-2 characters to the right of the real insertion point. And
> > hence it all becomes very difficult to write.
> >
> > On Mac OS X the 'Lucidad Grande' font is the default font - and support
> > for that font, would have been very good.
>
> The FAQ should explain that " How to change fonts?"
>   
> For more information about these configutation files, see 
> http://www.w3.org/Amaya/User/FontConfig.html
>   
(The H1 header of that page is unreadble because of same 
background-color and color.)

There are some things I don't understand with the fonts.gl file:

   1. Is «0 for unicode ( for japanese)» used _only_ for Japanese?
   2. What, if I e.g. set 'Times New Roman' for «1;#Latin1 (West
      European)», and in addition set 'New York' for «10;#Latin6
      (Nordic)» - what will I get for the letter «æ», which exist in
      both «Scripts»/charsets? Will I get New York if I use the
      ISO-8859-10 encoding in the web page, or what?

Some perhaps less important things:

   1. About this syntax, for writing several faces on the same line,

          <font-family>;<font-face>=<font descriptor>;<font descriptor>;....

      (where <font-face> is a number and <font descriptor> is a file
      path - unless I am mistaken) did you forget to include
      <font-face>-number before the second <font descriptor>;? Or should
      I be able to write this - without any number befor the bold and
      italic fonts?

      1;1=SeriFont-norm;SeriFont-bold;SeriFont-italic;SeriFont-bold-italic;


> If you have a better "fonts.gl.mac" available, don't hesitate to send us. It 
> will be integrated to our future distributions.
>   

I will look into that.

The fonts.gl.mac file contains reference to Cyberbit - which is supposed 
to be inside the $THOT/fonts directory, but I am unable to find that 
font there.

About the diacritical characters that we need to use, there really seems 
to be a bug in Amaya for Mac OS X when it comes to those characters - I 
tried to also test Amaya on  Windows, but as I only have emulation, I 
was not able to test properly. On my Windows, Amaya crashed when I 
pasted in combining acute accent (&#769;). OTOH, it did seem as if it 
did not have any effeect on the typing.

The problem on Mac is that, regardless which font I use, when I use that 
combining acute accent, then Amaya moves the cursor away from the 
letter, placing it above the next letter.

This happens per line. So if you have many combining accute letter per 
line, then the cursor/typing marker will move perhaps more than one 
character width away from the actual typing point. It also becomes 
difficult to select precisely.

So, I really hope you can look into this issue. For myself, it is the 
most important bug with Amaya, right now ...
-- 
leif halvard silli

Received on Saturday, 15 September 2007 03:04:47 UTC