Re: Video subsystem draft

["Vesa Jääskeläinen" <chaac@nic.fi>]

Vincent Pelletier wrote:
> By the way, there is already a font format handled by IEEE1275
> frame buffercards.
> - From the standard : 
> 
> set-font ( addr width height advance min-char #glyphs -- )
> Set the current font as specified.
> 
> So I think they can handle arbitrary-sized glyphs.
> I can't find the font data definition, but as "default-font" returns
> all those values for the default font, reverse engineering will be a
> matter of minutes.
> 
> If the font format you want to design could be compatible with ths one,
> it would be a pleasure to port it to sparc :) - and probably the same
> for PPC.

I am not familiar with that, but current implementation only supports
case when grub can read the actual font data itself and render it. So at
this point this is a requirement for graphical console. In principle if
necessary data can be acquired, hardware renderable fonts can be used
but there must be a mechanism to specify viewport that hardware font
rendering checks and does not exceed.

Currently font format itself is open to suggestions and I would like to
hear about possible issues related to some "foreigner" fonts that I
haven't used before. There perhaps are many different kinds of scripts
that might be unreasonable to support but at this point nothing is
dropped out.