Make Unicode font selection nicer/better

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Reported by Sakuya:

Since internationalization is the theme of the next release, I suppose 
it's time to mention that font display is cruddy on many Japanese pages 
with the default preferences, and with the fonts I got from Apple.
In new profiles, it appears that you get Osaka for most purposes, and 
Osaka-Touhaba for the monospaced font.

It looks like the 6 Truetype fonts which I got in Apple's JLK don't have 
hinting information for the less common type sizes, so 9,10,12,14 and 18 
point look good, as well as anything 24 or larger, but 11,13,15,16,17 
and 19-23 to varying extents look like crud.  These sizes can be avoided 
in word processing documents - SimpleText doesn't have any menu option 
to choose them - but they come up all the time in web pages.

Turning on anti-aliasing in the Appearances control panel helps. 
Switching the default serif font in Classilla from Osaka to Honminchou-M 
also helps.  If that isn't sufficient, one can play with the text zoom 
until the main text of a page is clearly displayed, but it usually 
results in other text on the page entering one of the less supported sizes.

Maybe it would be possible to add an option to the browser which would 
always round type sizes to the nearest "good" size.  Using the minimum 
font size option to boost the size of some text on the page doesn't 
break layout, so it seems that it should be possible.

Apart from that, I installed GNU Unifont, which has "glyphs for every 
printable code point in the Unicode 5.1 Basic Multilingual Plane".
(The idea of this font is not to give perfect characters for every 
script, but rather to give something for all the rest you don't usually 
use, with a single install.)
This can be had from http://unifoundry.com/unifont.html , and a 
shareware utility to convert the .ttf file to a Mac OS Classic format 
can be found at http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macos/4632 . 
  The font is 15.5MB uncompressed.

It looks like iCab 3.05E can recruit characters needed from among the 
fonts installed, and has distinct placeholder glyphs for many different 
scripts.  If I put Unifont into the fonts folder, it automatically picks 
it up and uses it.  It would be handy if Classilla could do the same 
thing - I set it to use unifont for Unicode-encoded pages, and many of 
the languages listed on www.wikipedia.org still display as ?????s.

...although that's more than you had planned for 9.2.1.

This probably has a lot of dependencies on layout, so we'll block this on issue 
1, but we do need to deal with this eventually.

Original issue reported on code.google.com by classi...@floodgap.com on 27 Jul 2010 at 12:35

• Blocking: #23
• Blocked on: #1

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Original comment by classi...@floodgap.com on 9 Sep 2010 at 3:52

• Added labels: Internationalization

[GoogleCodeExporter]

iCab 3.x uses ATSUI for rendering, which is available on Mac OS 8.5 and alter. 
Classilla is probably still using QuickDraw Text.

Original comment by yuhongba...@hotmail.com on 24 Jan 2011 at 3:27

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Actually, it does use ATSUI for Mac-specific things, which is where the 8.5 
requirement for Classilla comes in. It doesn't use it everywhere, but it would 
be better to clean up the remaining places after the layout transplant.

Original comment by classi...@floodgap.com on 26 Jan 2011 at 5:51