[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, 4 months
[Netsurf-develop] Could not resolve host
by Harriet Bazley
I just lost my Internet connection again with the dreaded report from
Netsurf of "Could not resolve host (Domain name not found)". Once
this has happened, the only way to get anything to work is to close the
connection and dial up again (and I usually reset the machine for safety
too). I had vaguely assumed it was connected to running WebsterXL, and
its known tendency to close files that don't belong to it (although
these are generally font handles), but on this occasion I hadn't run
Webster. The other possibility is that it is connected to starting a
large number of downloads and then aborting them before the fetch has
ended, which I do quite a lot on the IMDb pages - otherwise, every time
you vote on a user comment, the IMDb takes you all the way back to the
first comment page! I assume this is a bug on their part rather than a
feature that Netsurf doesn't support; at any rate all other RISC OS
browsers seem to react the same way.
But my question is: is this failure to 'resolve' a problem from the
Resolver module, a problem with running out of 'sockets', or something
that could be caused by Netsurf? I have the relevant log, although the
actual error is buried somewhere in the middle of it.
--
H. Bazley
An atheist is a man with no invisible means of support.
16 years, 7 months
Re: [Netsurf-develop] Renaming Full Save applications
by Tony Moore
On 27 Oct 2006, David Pitt <pittdj(a)pittdj.plus.com> wrote:
> In message <a992f37b4e.old_coaster(a)old_coaster.yahoo.co.uk>
> Tony Moore <old_coaster(a)yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>
> >On 22 Oct 2006, David Pitt <pittdj(a)pittdj.plus.com> wrote:
[snip]
> >> chkspr lower cases everything, not just A-Z. I have made an
> >> amendment which looks OK so far.
> >
> >Can you release an upgraded version, or will it be necessary to
> >contact the original author first?
>
> Consider yourself volunteered as a beta-tester, a zip is on its way.
Many thanks. It works perfectly and, in spite of trying, I have not been
able to trip it up.
[snip]
> I find chkspr is best used in a !Boot file, NetSurf does not have one
> in its full saves, the fike from the !ChkSpr demo can be copied. It is
> just this:-
>
> Run <Obey$Dir>.chkspr
> IconSprites <Obey$Dir>.!Sprites
Line_1 implies that chkspr must be copied to each full-save application.
However, that is not necessary if chkspr is placed in !boot.library.user
Line_1 above can then be simply 'Run chkspr'
Tony
Send instant messages to your online friends http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com
16 years, 7 months
[Netsurf-develop] NetSurf on Linux/x86_64
by Fernando Lemos
Hello,
I've successfuly compiled NetSurf (revision 3020 iirc, got it last
night from SVN) on a x86_64 machine running Arch Linux in "native"
x86_64 mode, with the GTK frontend.
I had to patch a lot of stuff. In fact, to make my job easier, I
reorganized the compilation scripts and the source tree, rewrote the
Makefile, etc.. I don't run RISC OS myself, so I don't implemented a
target for it in my build system, but I think that shouldn't be too
hard.
Also, I got rid of all warnings (I'm compiling with -Werror). It seems
to be 64-bit clean now, since it's running natively on x86_64. Most
fixes were related to bad typecasting (or lack thereof) and use of
32-bit centric units (e.g., trying to convert a pointer to an unsigned
integer). I also fixed one or two bugs, maybe more, but I only noticed
one or two really.
Here you can find an screenshot:
http://img166.imageshack.us/img166/6666/netsurfarch64gs4.jpg
Best regards,
Fernando Lemos.
PS: I'm not in the list, so please CC' to me when replying to this post.
16 years, 7 months
[Netsurf-develop] Scale View on Startup
by brian
Is it possible to display pages at greater then 100% scaled views as
a startup option? I mean, have NetSurf display at 160% as normal.
I can't see as way to do this in Iconbar=>Choices.
Brian
--
Auckland NEW ZEALAND
16 years, 7 months
[Netsurf-develop] HSBC
by Brian Jordan
Did everyone affected get a letter this morning from HSBC saying that
access from the Netsurf browser has been re-enabled?
Has anyone tried it?
Brian
--
______________________________________________________________________
Brian Jordan
>From somewhere in North Hampshire. England. UK.
______________________________________________________________________
16 years, 7 months
Re: [Netsurf-develop] url filenames
by Tony Moore
On 26 Oct 2006, Tony Moore <old_coaster(a)yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
[snip]
> I've downloaded http://home.planet.nl/~delink/Downloads/ConvText.zip
> by double clicking its address in an MPro window. Having dragged the
> NetSurf save-icon to a directory, to save the zipfile, I then control-
> dragged from the URL bar of the blank NetSurf window, and saved the
> url file, exactly as I previously described.
That was yesterday - but today I cannot repeat the performance. However,
I still have the saved url file (including the leafname) to show for it,
so I suppose that I was not dreaming!
I first noticed the problem of the url file overwriting the download,
last week when, having spent half an hour downloading a large zipfile
from Project Gutenberg, I dropped the url file on top of the download,
and then could not find the zipfile! The same thing occurred again, a
couple of times, before I realised what was happening.
According to the NetSurf User Guide:
The current URL can be dragged from the URL bar to be saved or
dropped onto other applications. A Ctrl drag saves the URL in Text
format and a Shift drag saves it in ANT URL format.
It would seem that something is preventing this happening, in some
circumstances, not yet identified.
Andy has referred to related problems in feature requests, but surely a
bug report is appropriate?
Tony
Send instant messages to your online friends http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com
16 years, 7 months
[Netsurf-develop] Updating NetSurf.
by Dr Peter Young
I've been told elsewhere that there is a script using wget which
automatically updates NetSurf, but have no idea where to find this.
Any ideas, please?
TIA,
With best wishes,
Peter.
--
Peter \ / \ Prestbury, Cheltenham, Glos. GL52
Anne \ / __ __ \ England.
and / / \ | | |\ | / _ \ http://pnyoung.orpheusweb.co.uk
family / \__/ \_/ | \| \__/ \______________ pnyoung(a)ormail.co.uk.
16 years, 7 months
[Netsurf-develop] How can NetSurf just quit unbidden?
by Christopher Bazley
Hi,
I must admit that I am writing this more out of frustration than
anything else. When I am using the Google mail website, NetSurf will
often simply quit without any explanation or warning message.
Invariably it leaves the hourglass running.
As I user, I find this more frustrating than if a fatal error had been
reported. How is it possible for a well-written application to simply
quit without warning? I would expect a failed assertion or direct
invocation of the abort() function to be reported to the user. I can
only assume that some code is calling SWI OS_Exit or the exit()
function, unless it is a bug in UnixLib.
I am not the only one suffering from this, as evidenced by bug report
#1579581. I would like to report my problem on the bug tracker, but I
am not sure that NetSurf's log would be any use under these
circumstances (I assume it doesn't contain a backtrace). I will have a
look in the log file after it next happens.
--
Chris Bazley
16 years, 7 months
