Unicode Font Handling improvements

[GoogleCodeExporter]

The built-in fonts have poor unicode support, many characters and symbols are
missing. It would be nice to have a fallback for missing chars, so that the
general look stays the same but good unicode coverage is preserved.

The attached patch is one way to do it: 8 additional "default" fonts from the
free DejaVu family serve as fallback. I cheated a little, they are not
actually built-in as I didn't know what tools were used for embedding.

Original issue reported on code.google.com by leftda...@gmail.com on 30 Mar 2010 at 5:20

Attachments:

• unicode.diff

[GoogleCodeExporter]

The font mechanism has changed quite a lot in the trunk, where development takes
place. Right now we're using fontconfig to load fonts from the system, though 
it has
some issues on Windows and it may not make it into the next release.

My intent is to ship the next release with default fonts that have better 
Unicode
coverage: Linux Libertine and Liberation Mono.

The fallback approach is technically possible but would result in mixing glyphs 
from
Deja Vu / Vera Sans with ones from the better-looking fonts.

Original comment by bcressey@gmail.com on 31 Mar 2010 at 12:21

• Changed state: WontFix

[GoogleCodeExporter]

My patches are against trunk as of two days ago. Liberation and Libertine, 
while better
than Charter/Luxi, have worse coverage than DejaVu.

Mixing glyphs is better than displaying a plain question mark for unsupported
characters. An alternative to DejaVu might be something like Code2000, which is
explicitly designed to contain as much of Unicode as possible.

Original comment by leftda...@gmail.com on 31 Mar 2010 at 4:53

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Can you submit your patch again? The one attached seems to be for issue #103 
instead.

Original comment by bcressey@gmail.com on 31 Mar 2010 at 8:35

• Changed state: Accepted

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Beyond the new propfont / monofont directives, and the ability to load OS fonts 
by name, I have no plans to pursue this. I would like to see this resolved 
through embedded fonts, or by bundling an attractive font with more glyph 
support.

Original comment by bcressey@gmail.com on 17 Aug 2010 at 9:37

• Changed state: WontFix