[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, 5 months
Re: [Netsurf-develop] NetSurf key handling does not comply with Style Guide
by John-Mark Bell
On Sun, 30 Apr 2006, Paul Vigay wrote:
> In article <f7712b7c0604300639w91112c4gfc40184bec68891a(a)mail.gmail.com>,
> Christopher Bazley <cs99cjb(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>
> [Snip]
>
>> Had I wanted to move to the next writable field, I would have pressed
>> Cursor down or Tab! The basic principle is that a user should be able
>> to activate the default action in a dialogue box with a single key
>> press, regardless of which field the caret is in at the time.
Fixed in SVN.
> Conversely, when editing/filling in a form on a website, pressing Return
> immediately submits the form to the website,
This is the behaviour exhibited by every browser I've ever used (and is
identical to what the style guide says).
> whereas personally I prefer it to move onto the next field.
>
> I guess both operations are personal preferences, but none the less,
> submitting a webform before you've filled it in is mildly more irritating
> than going to the next field. :-)
It's simple - pressing return in any[1] text input field will execute the
default action for the form/dialog you're currently filling. If you wish
to traverse text fields, use the standard Tab/Shift-Tab key presses.
John.
1. Multi-line text areas are an exception here, for obvious reasons.
17 years, 1 month
[Netsurf-develop] NetSurf key handling does not comply with Style Guide
by Christopher Bazley
Hello,
To many people this may seem like a trivial issue, but it concerns a
pet hate of mine and this seems to be the appropriate place to air it.
I have noticed that pressing the Return key in the 'Name' writable
field of the 'Edit address' dialogue box does not activate the default
('OK') action button; instead it moves the caret down to the next
('URL') writable field. This behaviour is contrary to the RISC OS 3
style guide and therefore has been deprecated for more than ten
years.
This is not merely a technicality - I truly find it irritating because
it is inconsistent with most RISC OS applications. Typically after
adding a URL to the hotlist I go to edit the (often ridiculously
verbose) page title. For example to reduce "Christopher's Drobe Launch
Pad - Home - RISC OS News and information" to "Drobe Launch Pad".
Having done so, I expect pressing Return to close the dialogue box
immediately.
Had I wanted to move to the next writable field, I would have pressed
Cursor down or Tab! The basic principle is that a user should be able
to activate the default action in a dialogue box with a single key
press, regardless of which field the caret is in at the time.
Please consider changing this.
--
Chris Bazley
17 years, 1 month
[Netsurf-develop] Close down message
by Gavin Wraith
With RO 5.11, NetSurf 26/04/06 17:30, experimentation
shows that closing down the machine while Netsurf still
has an open window causes a message to be output to the
screen. It is a bit pointless, because it cannot be read.
--
Gavin Wraith (gavin(a)wra1th.plus.com)
Home page: http://www.wra1th.plus.com/
17 years, 1 month
[Netsurf-develop] Message at shutdown
by Gavin Wraith
Sometimes when I shut down (RO 5.11) a message is flashed
up on the screen too quickly for me to read it properly.
I have a hunch that it is from the SharedUnixLibrary, and
that it occurs only after I have been running NetSurf.
How do I trap the message so that I can read it? My hunches
might be quite wrong, of course; so apologies if this turns
out to be the wrong forum.
--
Gavin Wraith (gavin(a)wra1th.plus.com)
Home page: http://www.wra1th.plus.com/
17 years, 1 month
[Netsurf-develop] Re: Upgrading error?
by Gordon F McLaren
On Wed 26 Apr, netsurf-develop-request(a)lists.sourceforge.net wrote:
>
> Message: 4
> Date: Tue, 25 Apr 2006 09:26:30 +0100 (BST)
> From: John-Mark Bell <jmb202(a)ecs.soton.ac.uk>
> To: netsurf-develop(a)lists.sourceforge.net
> Subject: Re: [Netsurf-develop] Upgrading error?
>
> On Mon, 24 Apr 2006, Gordon F McLaren wrote:
>
> > A strange error when saving a netsurf upgrade zip?
> >
> > RO4.39Adjust gives the following error message on drag and dropping
> > a downloaded netsurf/zip file on top of an existing zip file:-
> >
> > The file could not be saved due to an error:
> > ADFS:..........netsurf/zip is a directory
>
> This is usually caused by having SparkFS running at the time.
>
> > Doing the same operation with RO4.39Select does not error, and with
> > the overwrite choices set, asks whether to overwrite or not!
> >
> > If the zip file is saved elsewhere and then dragged and dropped the
> > file overwrite works ok.
>
> Unless I'm misremembering (highly probable), NetSurf will refuse to
> overwrite an existing file/directory.
I've done a couple of tests with an RO4.39Adjust RPC and can confim
that with SparkFS loaded at boot time this /error/ occurs.
Disabling SparkFS at boot time lets the /proper/ overwrite notice be
displayed and on clicking Yes then the file is overwritten as expected!
So what's different between RO4.39 Select and Adjust I wonder? Both OSs
were loading SparkFS at boot time!
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, 1 month
[Netsurf-develop] CSS and WebJames
by Mike Gilbert
Hello
NetSurf and Firefox share an inability to fully interpret CSS in an
external stylesheet served by WebJames. The site I'm playing with just
now, http://www.lewisgilbert.co.uk/thespians/ uses a stylesheet called
calendar.css to define the text colours and boxes in the (surprise)
calendar pages. Fine from the Zeus server at Eclipse, not there at all
locally on this machine from NS, or on the PC from Firefox. Fine from
both on IE, and both Oreganos do as much as can be expected - change
the text colour.
Relevant MimeMap line is:
text/css css f79 .css
File is typed to CSS on the RiscPC, path to file the same in both cases.
Any thoughts gratefully received.
TIA
Mike
--
Mike Gilbert
Webstuff at www.lewisgilbert.co.uk
17 years, 1 month
