[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
Re: [Netsurf-develop] Suggestion for NetSurf?
by David J. Ruck
On 30 Sep 2006 Paul Vigay <lists-nospam(a)vigay.com> wrote:
> It would be nice to be able to do a CTRL-V in the URL address bar, to paste
> URLs from elsewhere. :-)
Or from selected text in another netsurf window.
On a mildly related issue, I wish the object memu would work over links as
well as images. If you just want to provide someone with a URL to say a
particular zip file, instead of the whole page which may contain many zips,
its not easy. The object menu is greyed out, and clicking on the link
downloads it, I usually have to drag the page URL from the address bar, and
manually add the leafname from the download box.
Cheers
---Dave
--
____________________________________________________________________________
David J. Ruck Phone: +44- (0)7974 108301 Email: druck(a)druck.org.uk
____________________________________________________________________________
17 years, 2 months
Re: [Netsurf-develop] Suggestion for NetSurf?
by David J. Ruck
On 30 Sep 2006 Richard Porter <ricp(a)minijem.plus.com> wrote:
> On 30 Sep 2006 Paul Vigay wrote:
>
> > It would be nice to be able to do a CTRL-V in the URL address bar, to
> > paste URLs from elsewhere. :-)
>
> Seems to work here, both in 'Open URL' on the icon bar and the address
> bar on the main window. (4.39/1i2).
Select3 supports cut and paste between the global clipbaord and icons with
CTRL C,X,V. On other OS versions this functionality has to be implemented by
the application.
Cheers
---Dave
--
____________________________________________________________________________
David J. Ruck Phone: +44- (0)7974 108301 Email: druck(a)druck.org.uk
____________________________________________________________________________
17 years, 2 months
Re: [Netsurf-develop] Suggestion for NetSurf?
by Richard Porter
On 30 Sep 2006 Paul Vigay wrote:
> It would be nice to be able to do a CTRL-V in the URL address bar, to
> paste URLs from elsewhere. :-)
Seems to work here, both in 'Open URL' on the icon bar and the address
bar on the main window. (4.39/1i2).
--
_
|_|. _ Richard Porter http://www.minijem.plus.com/
|\_||_ mailto:ricp@minijem.plus.com
17 years, 2 months
Re: [Netsurf-develop] Suggestion for NetSurf?
by Dave
In article <4e6e72879alists-nospam(a)vigay.com>,
Paul Vigay <lists-nospam(a)vigay.com> wrote:
> It would be nice to be able to do a CTRL-V in the URL address bar, to
> paste URLs from elsewhere. :-)
Paul,
It work here using a SARPC and RO Select 4.39
Cheers
Dave S
--
17 years, 2 months
Re: [Netsurf-develop] Suggestion for NetSurf?
by Dr Peter Young
On 30 Sep 2006 Paul Vigay <lists-nospam(a)vigay.com> wrote:
>
> It would be nice to be able to do a CTRL-V in the URL address bar, to paste
> URLs from elsewhere. :-)
Or you could use IClear.
With best wishes,
Peter.
--
Peter \ / \ Prestbury, Cheltenham, Glos. GL52
Anne \ / __ __ \ England.
and / / \ | | |\ | / _ \ http://pnyoung.orpheusweb.co.uk
family / \__/ \_/ | \| \__/ \______________ pnyoung(a)ormail.co.uk.
17 years, 2 months
[Netsurf-develop] javascript question
by Ian Fitzgerald
I understand that a javascript interpreter is not currently going to be
implemented because of the time and energy impost - is that still the case
even if open-source code such as Mozilla's is used? Assuming this question
has been asked before.
IanF.
--
Ian Fitzgerald
ianf at ozemail dot com dot au
17 years, 2 months
Re: [Netsurf-develop] Suggestion for NetSurf?
by John Tytgat
In message <4e6e72879alists-nospam(a)vigay.com>
Paul Vigay <lists-nospam(a)vigay.com> wrote:
> It would be nice to be able to do a CTRL-V in the URL address bar, to paste
> URLs from elsewhere. :-)
Works here using Adjust (like in all other Wimp icons).
John.
--
John Tytgat, in his comfy chair at home BASS
John.Tytgat(a)aaug.net ARM powered, RISC OS driven
17 years, 2 months
Re: [Netsurf-develop] javascript question
by Harriet Bazley
On 27 Sep 2006 as I do recall,
druck(a)druck.org.uk wrote:
> On 26 Sep 2006 Daniel Silverstone <dsilvers(a)digital-scurf.org> wrote:
> > There is also code size to consider. The Mozilla JS interpreter will add
> > approximately 800kB to the binary size just for itself.
> >
> > Also, Mozilla's javascript interpreter is not that nice to use from a
> > programming PoV, it does not come with any of the required objects (they
> > all have to be implemented after you embed the interpreter) and so that
> > 800kB will rapidly evolve into (at my estimate) 1.5M of extra binary,
> > just for JS.
>
> I dont think binary size is any issue whatsoever.
[snip]
The Netsurf archive is already a non-trivial download - doubling the
size of the binary is most certainly an issue in how frequently I'm
prepared to download new versions, for a start.
--
H. Bazley
Equal bytes for women.
17 years, 2 months
Re: [Netsurf-develop] javascript question
by David J. Ruck
On 28 Sep 2006 Paul Vigay <lists-nospam(a)vigay.com> wrote:
>
> In article <2526256d4e.harriet(a)freeuk.com>,
> Harriet Bazley <lists(a)orange.wingsandbeaks.org.uk> wrote:
>
> > The Netsurf archive is already a non-trivial download - doubling the size
> > of the binary is most certainly an issue in how frequently I'm prepared
> > to download new versions, for a start.
>
> Indeed. I'm sure some people forget that a lot of people don't have
> broadband - and quite a few people don't even have the luxury of 56K dialup.
Well if you are going to use that as a criteria to limit developement we
might as well pack up and go home right now. Doubling the binary will only
add about 75% to the size of the download, and if thats too much for dialup
users, tben download it less often, there are plenty of people with broadband
that can test the daily builds.
Cheers
---Dave
--
____________________________________________________________________________
David J. Ruck Phone: +44- (0)7974 108301 Email: druck(a)druck.org.uk
____________________________________________________________________________
17 years, 2 months
