[Netsurf-develop] Font / Unicode overview
by James Bursa
In an attempt to answer the questions that have appeared recently,
I've written a guide to fonts and Unicode support in NetSurf.
James
______________________________________________________________________
Fonts in NetSurf
NetSurf has support for displaying pages containing Unicode characters
that aren't normally available on RISC OS, for example accented Latin
letters, Greek, Cyrillic, Japanese, and various symbols.
The font choices let you pick a font for each of the five standard
families available to web authors (in CSS). The choices specify the
preferred font to use. If a character is not available in the chosen
font, but it's present in some other font that you have installed,
then NetSurf will automatically use it. There's no need to change the
font choices to view pages with characters that are not available in
the chosen font.
Note that you can only choose a font family. NetSurf will
automatically use weights from the family for bold and slanted text,
if available.
Installing more fonts
The fonts that come with RISC OS cover Latin (Homerton, Trinity,
Corpus), Greek (Sidney), and various symbols (Selwyn, Sidney). (On
RISC OS 3-4, only the "Latin 1" characters from the standard fonts,
which cover Western European languages, can be used by NetSurf).
If you want to display pages with other characters correctly, you'll
need to install fonts containing them. When a character is not present
in any available font, the Unicode character code will be displayed.¹
Any font supplied with a correctly designed "Encoding" file should
work. In practice, native fonts covering anything other than Latin 1
are rare. The solution is to convert TrueType fonts using TTF2f (this
currently produces fonts suitable for RISC OS 5 only).
After installing new fonts, NetSurf will need restarting so that it
detects them.
Problems and unimplemented features
* The default font is always the sans-serif one.
* Printing on RISC OS 5 doesn't work, due to lack of support in the
Font Manager and printer drivers. Printing to Postscript printers on
RISC OS 3-4 is not correctly implemented in NetSurf.
* Substituted characters are taken from the first font that contains
them, even if a character which matches the weight or slant better
is available.
* Only two weights (regular and bold) are supported, even if a family
contains other weights. The algorithm that finds weights needs
improving, for example using the heuristics given in CSS 2.1 15.6.
* Drawfile export is broken.
* Right-to-left text (Hebrew, Arabic) is not implemented.
____________________
¹ If you see the codes 0091, 0092, 0096, or others starting 009, that
indicates that the page is not specifying the character set that it
is using correctly. Installing fonts won't help. We haven't yet
decided what the best way to work around this problem is.
16 years, 8 months
[Netsurf-develop] Reporting bugs
by James Bursa
Due to lack of time, we're finding it difficult to reply to bug
reports on this list, and keep track of what needs fixing. Therefore
we've decided to change the way we do things.
>From now on, please report bugs to the bug tracker on SourceForge
instead of to this list:
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?atid=464312&group_id=51719
If you set up a SourceForge account, you'll get an email whenever
something changes on a bug that you reported, and you can also choose
to monitor other bugs. Otherwise you'll need to note your bug number
and check back for changes.
There is also a similar tracker on SourceForge for feature requests.
Thanks!
James
17 years, 5 months
[Netsurf-develop] Links using paths & WinSnap
by Adam
Hi All,
Consider:
<a href="AppNameRes:Help.html">Link</a>
(Where AppNameRes is some path variable.) If I click on this link, NetSurf
presents the file as a download (with type "data") rather than rendering
the file in the browser window. Is this a bug - or am I just missing
something obvious?
I use WinSnap and have nticed that while dragging NetSurf windows around
works as expected, if re-sizing the window does not snap to the top of the
icon bar - is it possible to make this work?
Thanks,
Adam
--
Adam Richardson Carpe Diem
http://www.snowstone.org.uk/riscos/
17 years, 8 months
[Netsurf-develop] Input boxes
by Mike Binks
Hi Folks,
I would like to draw to the attention of those working on the program
two problems that I have had with sites today.
Using Test Build (19th Dec 2005 22:00)
http://en.wikipedia.org doesn't let me enter anything in the search
box.
whereas
www.britannica.com does but the box is too small.
If these could be addressed I would be grateful but not as grateful as
I am already for the wonders you have produced in getting this browser
off the ground in the first place.
My best wishes to you all in the new year.
--
Mike Binks On a RiscPC
mailto:mike@hollybank.net in Bonnie Galloway
http://www.hollybank.net Christian by Grace
17 years, 8 months
[Netsurf-develop] Disc cache
by Brian Howlett
According to http://netsurf.sourceforge.net/progress "Disc Cache - Not
started".
Presumably this is no longer the case - I've got WWW.Netsurf.Cache in
!Scrap which consists of 3,137 files, totalling 88,731,380 bytes - not
in itself a problem as I have plenty of HDD space, but does it expire,
or will there eventually become a need to delete files manually?
--
Brian Howlett
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A man with a briefcase can steal more money than any man with a gun"...
- Don Henley
17 years, 8 months
[Netsurf-develop] Is there an answer to this - update
by Gordon F McLaren
Thanks to all who replied and suggested various things to try
regarding the slow loading time on this machine (RO4.39S).
Having got Xmas over, I've done a some more tests including checking
the number of fonts loaded, size of hotlist, history and Rufl.
Whilst this machine has more fonts, 39 compared with and avg of 30
on the other machines, a bigger Rufl file 166669 -v- 105861 to 134054,
a larger History file 10878 -v- 173 to 738 and ditto the Hotlist file
6498 -v- 1221 to 4140 I can't /see/ anything else that's much different
;-(
I've tried blitzing all the extra fonts right back to the ROM fonts
only, and renamed Rufl, History and Hotlist and done a reboot but
the startup loading time remained at 29 seconds or so!
So today I've deleted all things Netsurf and reinstalled it again from
scratch.
Now the loading time is down to 17 seconds but still nowhere near the
average 5 seconds on the other four machine!
So I'm at a loss now ;-(
The only thing of note that I didn't report to start with is that the
HDD light is constantly on, i.e. no flicker, for most of the loading
time and the NS hourglass only appears for the last couple of seconds
or so.
Regards,
Gordon McLaren
--
Wardlaw Surveys - Acorn Centre of Technology, Iiyama Dealer
- Authorised Installer for RISC OS 4
Wardlaw House, Kirkhill, Inverness. IV5 7NB. Scotland. UK.
Tel/FAX +44 (0)1463 831214 http://www.wardlaw.demon.co.uk
e-mail: info(a)wardlaw.demon.co.uk
17 years, 9 months
[Netsurf-develop] Incompatibility between NetSurf and RiScript
by Dave Higton
Not sure whether this is a known problem.
If RiScript is already running when I try to run NetSurf, I get an
error message written over the screen: "UnixLib detected recursion
of signal SIGSEGV. Exiting." and an hourglass that doesn't go
away. If I quit RiScript, the hourglass stops, and I can then
run NetSurf without an error.
Iyonix, 5.10 rel 10, NetSurf 18 Dec 2005 16:00, RiScript 5.02
Dec 21 2005), though it happened with earlier releases of all of
them too, i.e. I don't know of the problem being specific to any
particular release of OS, NS or RS.
Dave
17 years, 9 months
Re: [Netsurf-develop] Is there an answer to this?
by Gary Locock
In article <4dddefc4d0lists-nospam(a)vigay.com>,
Paul Vigay <lists-nospam(a)vigay.com> wrote:
> In article <4dddec080fgary(a)locock.co.uk>,
> Gary Locock <gary(a)locock.co.uk> wrote:
> > Intermittently NS takes a long time to load here, too, about half a
> > minute. It seems to be related to whether Oregano2 has also been run,
> > (i.e. less likely to happen if O2 already loaded), but I haven't really
> > been able to work out the connection, if any. It doesn't automatically
> > happen if O2 has no been run either; very confusing. The bookmarks list
> > is longer than your 40.
> Are you referring to loading NS, or time taken to fetch pages?
Loading time, it can hourglass for quite a long time under certain
circumstances which I haven't been able to define. Less so with more recent
versions, I think.
NS is quick at fetching pages, once it has loaded.
> I'm
> wondering if there's a subtle problem with the resolver module somewhere,
> as NS and O2 both rely on it (I presume?).
Certainly true that my ISP has an erratic name server, but NS doesn't look
for any pages while it is loading, AFAIK.
Question is, is it the same issue that Gordon was reporting? Gordon seems to
get it all the time, I only see this intermittently.
Gary
--
Gary Locock, Network Manager, Bablake Junior School
Coundon Road, Coventry CV1 4AU
School Website: http://www.bablakejs.co.uk
Private mail: g a r y (at) l o c o c k . c o . u k
---
[This E-mail has been scanned for viruses but it is your responsibility
to maintain up to date anti virus software on the device that you are
currently using to read this email. ]
17 years, 9 months
Re: [Netsurf-develop] Is there an answer to this?
by John-Mark Bell
On Fri, 23 Dec 2005, Paul Vigay wrote:
>
> In article <4dddec080fgary(a)locock.co.uk>,
> Gary Locock <gary(a)locock.co.uk> wrote:
>
>> Intermittently NS takes a long time to load here, too, about half a
>> minute. It seems to be related to whether Oregano2 has also been run,
>> (i.e. less likely to happen if O2 already loaded), but I haven't really
>> been able to work out the connection, if any. It doesn't automatically
>> happen if O2 has no been run either; very confusing. The bookmarks list
>> is longer than your 40.
Any relationship between the two is highly likely to be coincidental. More
likely is a sizeable URL or History file causing NetSurf to take a long
time loading (or, depending upon your setup, rescanning of installed fonts
by RUfl - note that a full rescan only occurs if the RUfl_cache file is
deleted)
> Are you referring to loading NS, or time taken to fetch pages? I'm
> wondering if there's a subtle problem with the resolver module somewhere,
> as NS and O2 both rely on it (I presume?).
Nope. NetSurf doen't use the Resolver module.
John.
17 years, 9 months
