Font selection, font downloads, and (writing system) scripts

This discussion belongs on www-style, so setting Reply-To to there.
Philippe, could you explain what you meant by

 > The key issue here is to create documents that refer to font families
 > according to their usage rather than their exact appearance and the
 > limited set of languages and scripts they support.

?

~fantasai

Philippe Verdy wrote:
> From: "Christopher Fynn" <cfynn@gmx.net>
...
> Christopher Fynn wrote:
> 
>> I've noticed, that with Windows and IE, - when going to a page with
>> characters for a script for which fonts are not installed my system, IE will
>> sometimes ask whether or not I want to download & install fonts for that script
>> from Microsoft's web site.
>> This only happens in some cases - even where the same script is involved.
>> I've looked the source of some of these pages but I've never been able to
>> identify just what what triggers this. Does anyone know?
...
>> I'd also like to figure out a way to trigger this kind of behavior  in 
>> other browsers as well as in IE (using Java Script or Java rather than 
>> VB) as not quite everyone uses IE - (but I guess you are not going to 
>> give me any more clues on how to do that :-) )
> 
> 
> If only there was a portable way to determine in JavaScript that a 
> string can be rendered with the existing fonts, or to enumerate the 
> installed fonts and get some of their properties... we could prompt the 
> user to install some fonts or change their browser settings, or we could 
> autoadapt the CSS style rules, notably the list of fonts inserted in the 
> "font-family:" or abbreviated "font:" CSS properties...
> 
> There are limited controls with the CSS "@" keys that allow building 
> "virtual" font names, but not enough to tune the font selections by 
> script or by code point ranges. And Javascript is of little help to 
> paliate.
> Certainly there's a need to include in a refined standard DOM for styles 
> the properties needed to manage prefered font stacks associated to a 
> virtual font name (for example, in a way similar to what Java2D v1.5 
> allows), that can then be referenced directly within legacy HTML <font 
> name="virtualname"> or in CSS "font-family: virtualname" properties 
> (some examples of virtual font names are standardized in HTML: "serif", 
> "sans-serif", "monospace"; Java2D or AWT adds "dialog" and 
> "dialoginput"; but other virtual names could be defined as well like 
> "decorated" or "handscript" or "ocr").
> 
> The key issue here is to create documents that refer to font families 
> according to their usage rather than their exact appearance and the 
> limited set of languages and scripts they support.
> 
> Another possibility would be to create a portable but easily tunable 
> font format (XML based? so that they can be created or tuned by 
> scripting through DOM?) which would be a list of references to various 
> external but actual fonts or glyph collections, and parameters to allows 
> selecting in them with various priorities. For now this is not 
> implemented in font technologies (OpenType, Graphite, ...) but within 
> vendor-specific renderer APIs (than contain some rules to create such 
> font mappings).

Received on Sunday, 21 November 2004 18:50:49 UTC