[Bf-committers] Int'l Fonts on OSX

[Charles Wardlaw]

Hi again,

Someone mentioned that opentype fonts don't work with freetype, but I
didn't have a problem loading a CJK opentype font under OSX...  What it
doesn't recognize are the fonts ending in '.dfont', and I have no idea
what they are.  But both OTF and TTF seem to load just fine.

For now, people interested in CJK support can download the free
CyberCJK font from the Netscape site:

http://ftp.netscape.com/pub/communicator/extras/fonts/windows/

The one in CyberCJK.ZIP works fine, and the license says it's free for
non-commercial use.  Unfortunately, it also brings up the very valid
point that including a CJK font in a blender release would make the
tarball jump about 7 meg in size, so it might be best to have seperate
international and english builds?  I'd suggest a patch or installer for
the international support, but that would look like a shoddy hack to
the user, IMHO.

I can't wait to see someone hack in support for Arabic. :)

There are other issues too.  The file selector doesn't display
international filenames properly (at least not in japanese).  The text
editor under OSX isn't able to accept input from the system language
input software -- when international support is enabled, it should pass
control of string input back to the OS so that XP and OSX can pass it
back multibyte characters.  (I've never done japanese input on my Red
Hat box, so I don't know how it functions under linux.)  Either way,
it'd be best to have the OS handle this instead of writing a custom
input handler for each supported language into Ghost. ^_^;;

As for adding characters to Vera: I gave this some thought.  In the
case of chinese or japanese, however, we wouldn't be able to just input
the characters that the interface uses (although we can *start* with
those), since the user would likely want to be able to input text in
their own language.  This brings us back to the input problem above.

- Charles

--- Matt Ebb <matt@mke3.net> wrote:
> Quoting Charles Wardlaw <kattkieru@yahoo.com>:
> 
> > Are there any opensource fonts for larger code sets?  It'd be
> really
> > cool for blender to have in-built support in one monolithic unicode
> > font or many smaller fonts, one for each non-latin language. 
> Something
> > like that Vera font that was released for the Gnome foundation?
> > Anybody?
> 
> Not that I know of. For your information, the .bfont.tff *is* Vera
> Sans :). 
> unfortunately it doesn't have CJK characters, but I guess there's
> always the 
> opportunity that someone might add them. The point about adding that
> note to 
> the docs is a good one.
> 
> Cheers
> 
> matt
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