In an attempt to answer the questions that have appeared recently,
I've written a guide to fonts and Unicode support in NetSurf.
James
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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.
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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.
Show replies by date
In article <f3c8dd614d.james(a)ix.strcprstskrzkrk.co.uk>,
James Bursa <james(a)semichrome.net> wrote:
In an attempt to answer the questions that have appeared recently,
I've written a guide to fonts and Unicode support in NetSurf.
Excellent; will this go into the HTML manual too?
--
Jeremy C B Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
I have discovered an oddity this morning which I think is ultimately
caused by a faulty DNS resolver at my ISP, but it may be NetSurf behaving
oddly too, I am not sure.
With (yes, the latest version of) NetSurf this morning, any external URL
resulted in the immediate response "Could not resolve host" but other
browsers worked on the same and other machines, albeit O2 on the same
machine seems to take longer than usual to display the first page from a
domain.
Its decision happens so fast, it seems to me that NetSurf tries once to
resolve names to numbers and gives up, without checking alternate
resolvers in Configure.
Is NetSurf ignoring secondary resolvers? It transpired that I had
transposed my ISP's two name servers on this Iyonix but not on a RiscPC
or Windoze box. I reversed the DNS entries in configure 'et voìla'
NetSurf working again...and O2 up to its usual plod.
T
--
Tim Hill,
www.timil.com