[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, 11 months
[Netsurf-develop] Is it me or is it Sitemeter? (or Netsurf)
by Steve Turnbull
Hi
I use Sitemeter (www.sitemeter.com) for monitoring one of my websites,
Netsurf always seemed to have problems -- sometimes just failing to
properly render a page, even though View source showed that it was
downloaded, but a refresh would usually get it.
Recent versions of Netsurf didn't have problems (apart from cookie
issues but I understand about that) but 2 Jun 06 now completely
refuses to render even the login page properly.
When I say "refuses", actually what it's always done is put a box at
the top of the screen and the Sitemeter rotating GIF in that box. But
nothing else.
Before I report it as a bug, is this a known problem? Is it something
wrong with the server? Something else?
Kind regards
Steve
--
Steve Turnbull (steve@theturnbulls(dot)fsworld(dot)co(dot)uk)
... Can I stop typing in taglines now please?
17 years, 4 months
[Netsurf-develop] Font problem(s)
by Christopher Rayson
Hi,
I'm having some problems with fonts.
When I start NetSurf, it always seems to revert to using its own choice of
fonts, rather than any I've previously made from the Choices... dialogue.
In particular, it always starts up with 'Arial' as its preferred san-serif
font, rather than Homerton.
Unfortunately, NetSurf seems unable to display text in Arial correctly, as
all the spaces between words vanishes. I think the font is a conversion
from Harry Decker's site, so this could be a problem with a low-quality
font rather than NetSurf itself.
If I then change the san-serif font to Homerton from the Fonts dialogue,
all san-serif text vanishes from previously-loaded pages; if I try to
refresh, or open a new page, NetSurf crashes and asks me to submit the log
file. When restarted (either after a crash, or if I quit as soon as I've
changed the font choices), NetSurf reverts to Arial.
I'm just about to attempt submitting the log to the bugtracker, but I
wasn't sure if the font choice behaviour or missing spaces were related,
or indeed bugs at all, so thought I'd mention them seperately here. Hope
that's OK.
thanks,
Chris
(Using RISC OS 4.03, RiscStation)
17 years, 5 months
[Netsurf-develop] Impressed!
by Jan-Jaap van der Geer
I am impressed by the changes lately...
- working cookies
- wikipedia search-field working
- wikipedia homepage looks good now
Great!
(OK, if I need to be critical, the globe on the wikipedia page
isn't centered, but otherwise...)
Netsurf has become a lot better these last few weeks!
Thanks!
Cheers,
Jan-Jaap
17 years, 5 months
[Netsurf-develop] loading time
by Tony Moore
Recent SVN Activity:
> 2006-06-27 17:59 - rjw - trunk/netsurf/utils/url.c
>
> Massively optimise common URL functions. This should (a) drastically
> reduce the start-up time for users with a large history/hotlist, and
> (b) decrease the loading time for pages with a sizable number of
> references.
Start-up times using SARPC, RO4.49:
Test Build (26 Jun 2006 20:30) 14 seconds
Test Build (27 Jun 2006 19:00) 5 seconds
Brilliant! Many thanks.
Tony
___________________________________________________________
All new Yahoo! Mail "The new Interface is stunning in its simplicity and ease of use." - PC Magazine
http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html
17 years, 5 months
[Netsurf-develop] Web FORMS
by Barry Allen
Hi Folks,
I have a few FORMs on my website but Netsurf doesn't seem to like them
coming up with an error as shown below:-
"
The author of the page needs to include the following HTML tag within
the form:
< INPUT NAME = "recipient" VALUE = "your_email_address_here" TYPE =
HIDDEN >
"
Is this a NETSURF error message or one generated from elsewhere?
The forms seem to work OK with other browsers.
ZEN forms don't have the particular format referred to but another
format see below:-
<input type="hidden" name="recipient" value="zen#####"> where ##### is
my account number.
There is another line which shows where the email should be directed
to:-
<input type="hidden" name="index" value="22"> where 22 is the 22nd
email address in a list on my site.
--
Barry A.
Rugby Union in Manchester:- http://www.broughton-park.org.uk/
17 years, 5 months
Re: [Netsurf-develop] Impressed!
by Clive Bonsall
Paul Vigay wrote:
>
> In article <44A148E4.2090602(a)ed.ac.uk>,
> Clive Bonsall <C.Bonsall(a)ed.ac.uk> wrote:
>
>> Mine hasn't, I'm afraid ... I still can't access the University of
>> Edinburgh's webmail service.
>
> Are they using SquirrelMail by any chance?
>
> NetSurf still doesn't work with SquirrelMail. Not sure if it's cookies or
> frame support that is lacking, but Squirrel mail just gives 'You must be
> logged in to access this page' errors in all frames after trying to login.
Yes, I believe so ...
--
Clive Bonsall
17 years, 5 months
[Netsurf-develop] MyEbay page corrupted
by John
Well done with the cookies: I am now able to log on to eBay at the first
attempt :)
Something has changed on the "MyeBay" page, though: on the LH side of this
page the "My Messages", "Contacts" and "Related Links" boxes above one
another overwrite the text of the main part of the page. This was not the
case up to the version of 21st June . . . .
Having written that, I reverted to the 21June version to check, and the
page has changed, but does not present properly there now either : on the
21June version of NS the boxes mentioned are now by themselves, displacing
the rest of the bage below them.
So it's clearly a change to the eBay page throwing NS, but is it the page
that is now written wrongly or NS unable to display it?
http://my.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?MyeBay but one needs to log on to
display the page. The "Messages Inbox" page has a similar problem, but
otherwise the site seems fine.
John
--
____
/__ __________________________
/____Mail from John(a)JohnWoodhouse.co.uk
. . . using RISCOS 5.11 on an XScale powered Iyonix computer.
17 years, 5 months
[Netsurf-develop] Error Message from latest download
by John Oram
Hi
I have happily been using !NetSurf for a while now, and thought I had
better get the latest version (my existing one being Test Build (07
Nov 2005 21:30)), Attempts to load this new copy to my iconbar
generated "Message from NetSurf - Unicode font library could not be
initialized. Please report this to the Developers" (which I am now
doing).
The same 'error' is generated whether I run the new downloaded version
by itself, or whether I load it on top of my existing version.
Fortunately I have kept a separate copy of the existing one, so will
go on using this - but please can you tell me where I am going wrong.
Thanks in anticipation.
John O.
--
17 years, 5 months
[Netsurf-develop] Moorcroft website
by Nick Bailey
The latest build (26 Jun 2006, 13.30) doesn't appear to render
www.mrwc.org.uk correctly.
Only the tip of Moorcroft Boys ear is showing, the rest of the page is
blank. Just to the right of Moorcrofts ear appears to be a set of
slider controls, but none work.
You can't get into the site as the link is just below a group of
picture at the bottom of the page.
Site problem or Netsurf problem?
Cheers
Nick
17 years, 5 months
