Font selection, font downloads, and (writing system) scripts

From: fantasai (fantasai.lists@inkedblade.net)
Date: Sun Nov 21 2004 - 11:49:05 CST

  • Next message: Doug Ewell: "Re: Unicode HTML, download"

    This discussion belongs on www-style, so setting Reply-To to there.
    Philippe, could you explain what you meant by

    > The key issue here is to create documents that refer to font families
    > according to their usage rather than their exact appearance and the
    > limited set of languages and scripts they support.

    ?

    ~fantasai

    Philippe Verdy wrote:
    > From: "Christopher Fynn" <cfynn@gmx.net>
    ...
    > Christopher Fynn wrote:
    >
    >> I've noticed, that with Windows and IE, - when going to a page with
    >> characters for a script for which fonts are not installed my system, IE will
    >> sometimes ask whether or not I want to download & install fonts for that script
    >> from Microsoft's web site.
    >> This only happens in some cases - even where the same script is involved.
    >> I've looked the source of some of these pages but I've never been able to
    >> identify just what what triggers this. Does anyone know?
    ...
    >> I'd also like to figure out a way to trigger this kind of behavior in
    >> other browsers as well as in IE (using Java Script or Java rather than
    >> VB) as not quite everyone uses IE - (but I guess you are not going to
    >> give me any more clues on how to do that :-) )
    >
    >
    > If only there was a portable way to determine in JavaScript that a
    > string can be rendered with the existing fonts, or to enumerate the
    > installed fonts and get some of their properties... we could prompt the
    > user to install some fonts or change their browser settings, or we could
    > autoadapt the CSS style rules, notably the list of fonts inserted in the
    > "font-family:" or abbreviated "font:" CSS properties...
    >
    > There are limited controls with the CSS "@" keys that allow building
    > "virtual" font names, but not enough to tune the font selections by
    > script or by code point ranges. And Javascript is of little help to
    > paliate.
    > Certainly there's a need to include in a refined standard DOM for styles
    > the properties needed to manage prefered font stacks associated to a
    > virtual font name (for example, in a way similar to what Java2D v1.5
    > allows), that can then be referenced directly within legacy HTML <font
    > name="virtualname"> or in CSS "font-family: virtualname" properties
    > (some examples of virtual font names are standardized in HTML: "serif",
    > "sans-serif", "monospace"; Java2D or AWT adds "dialog" and
    > "dialoginput"; but other virtual names could be defined as well like
    > "decorated" or "handscript" or "ocr").
    >
    > The key issue here is to create documents that refer to font families
    > according to their usage rather than their exact appearance and the
    > limited set of languages and scripts they support.
    >
    > Another possibility would be to create a portable but easily tunable
    > font format (XML based? so that they can be created or tuned by
    > scripting through DOM?) which would be a list of references to various
    > external but actual fonts or glyph collections, and parameters to allows
    > selecting in them with various priorities. For now this is not
    > implemented in font technologies (OpenType, Graphite, ...) but within
    > vendor-specific renderer APIs (than contain some rules to create such
    > font mappings).



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