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.