Re: TECH: Unicode ranges in various fonts (was Re: ML4)

On Sun, 23 Nov 2003, Stephen Mulraney wrote:

> Tristan McLeay wrote:
> Great - that might help. If mozilla doesn't let you choose the order, it might
> just search the fonts in the order that the server spits 'em out. So it might
> indeed help to play with the server config. Didn't occur to me. Thanks!
Well, I was thinking it might just give you the character returned.
Xft/Freetype or whatever it is is designed to give you a character if
there is one, even if it doesn't look like the one you askde for. But I
guess it's the same hting in the end, isn't it?

>  > There has to be some other,
> > platform-independent way, but that worked for me when disabling Times (New
> > Roman) and Helvetica/Arial (which for some reason look a _lot_ worse on a
> > laptop running X than a desktop running Windows).
>
> Hmm... have you got the laptop display set to its preferred resolution (usually
> the largest that it can do)? Since laptop screens are LCD the pixels are real
> physical *thingies*, unlike in a cathode ray tube. Setting an LCD to a resolution
> that's not its natural one works, due to some cleverness, but doesn't look as good.
> And when I try it, the most obvious thing that's wrong is that fonts look worse.
Yes indeed (and if I use a smaller resolution, it doesn't expand to fill,
so I can see the actuall difference in size between 1024x768, 800x600 and
640x480 :). And, for instance, fonts like Bitstream Vera * or Verdana (or,
in fact, just about every font other than Times/Helvetica/Courier/Windows
versions thereof) look perfectly fine. But T./H./C. become really bad
until brought up to 14 pt. (The bitmapped Times isn't incredibly bad, but
it's bitmapped, and Georgia, Palatino and BV Serif are still much more
readable. The Windows TTF is incredibly bad, but I understand that's
because the Windows fonts were written to use the Windows' font thingy
deal with them.)

(Another problem with one of the Windows fonts---I forget which one,
starts with T---is that something's funny with it, and as long as it's
installed on my system, I get Cyrilic chars at the end of Latin Ex. B and
the start of the IPA extns.

--
Tristan