[Bf-committers] builtin bfont.ttf upgrade

[Matt Ebb]

Hi,

Jiri (and another person on the forums) have previously noted that  
the default included interface TTF font file doesn't include very  
many characters, and doesn't cover their language's character sets.  
This is a problem for Jiri, who's translating Blender into Czech.

The builtin bfont.ttf is Vera Sans, an 'open source' font donated by  
Bitstream a while ago, but it doesn't support much more than the  
basic Latin alphabet. There's a variant of Vera now, called DejaVu  
Sans, which has been extended to include many more characters, and it  
would be good to use this as the bfont.ttf instead. The only problem  
is that DejaVu is (to the project's credit) very complete, and quite  
large. The straight DejaVu Sans bfont.ttf.c source file after running  
datatoc is quite huge - about 1.8MB.

So I opened up the source file in FontForge and trimmed it down a bit  
to make a kind of DejaVu 'lite'. I got rid of these character sets:
- IPA/Phonetic extensions
- Arabic (I don't think blender's text system supports right-to-left  
anyway, and there is no arabic translation)
- Greek extended (ancient greek)
- dingbats and obscure mathematical symbols
- Braille

It's not about 40% of the original size, but it still contains enough  
to support most of our included translations and future ones too
- All basic and extended Latin ( covering most eastern European  
languages, and also Vietnamese)
- Cyrillic
- Greek

I've put the source file online here: http://mke3.net/rt/ 
bfont.ttf.c.zip . If people who use non-english translations in  
Blender could put it in their source/blender/src dir, compile and  
test, that would be great. If it works well, and I haven't gone too  
far in my editing, I can commit it.

cheers

Matt



------------------------------------------
Matt Ebb • matt at mke3.net • http://mke3.net



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