Re: Cyrillic fonts

Phillip Helbig---remove CLOTHES to reply wrote:
> In article <[email protected]>, Ognyan
> Kulev <[email protected]> writes: 
> 
> 
>>Phillip Helbig---remove CLOTHES to reply wrote:
>>
>>>I DO have different sizes of Cyrillic fonts 
>>>on my system, and I can see that Mozilla can find them, but they don't 
>>>seem to be used.
>>
>>Scalable fonts (e.g. TrueType) doesn't have different sizes.  Are your
>>cyrillic fonts bitmap fonts?  Please try with scalable cyrillic fonts,
>>like DejaVu <http://dejavu.sourceforge.net/>.
> 
> 
> Yes, they are bitmap fonts.  Do I have to have scalable fonts?
> 
> Assuming I can get some scalable fonts, do I need to install them just 
> as for any other fonts?
> 
> I DO have Cyrillic fonts working, but just in one size/shape/style.  
> Presumably, it is a bitmap font.  Does that make sense?
> 
> What is the reason why Mozilla needs scalable, as opposed to bitmap, 
> fonts?
> 

IIUC, there are three main families of fonts:

Bitmapped fonts: Each bitmapped font comes in only a finite (and usually 
small) number of preset sizes. Some browsers can (and others maybe 
won't) create other sizes "as needed" by redoubling pixels, but it 
usually gives such "interpolated" bitmap fonts an ugly aspect; in 
particular, the larger sizes look made up of big black squares.

Hardware fonts are fonts predefined in your display or printer firmware. 
Each of them comes in only a small number of preset sizes and cannot be 
scaled IIUC. They vary from one printer to the next and from one display 
card to the next, though some (like printers' Courier, not Courier New 
which is a scalable font) are very widespread. If your Cyrillic font is 
such a hardware font, that would certainly explain why it cannot be scaled.

Scalable fonts, also known as vector fonts: These define each glyph by 
means of vector shapes like straight lines, circle arcs, etc. Such fonts 
can be zoomed in or out to any possible size by drawing longer or 
shorter lines, bigger or smaller arcs, etc.; and they will always look 
nice, especially in the bigger sizes. There are several file formats for 
such scalable fonts IIUC: like "True Type", "Adobe Type I", etc.; from 
the user's point of view they all function the same AFAICT.

On my XP system, font names (in a font chooser dialog) are prefixed by 
TT or O (scalable fonts IIUC) or nothing (bitmapped or hardware fonts IIUC).

So yes, IMO it might make sense.


Best regards,
Tony.