Re: fonts for gfxmenu, help needed

[Qianqian Fang <fangqq@gmail.com>]

Vladimir 'φ-coder/phcoder' Serbinenko wrote:
> AFAIK Hanja isn't used a lot and in GRUB2 particularly I see only names
> which could possibly use Hanja. Also quick look into ko.po of glibc
> doesn't reveal any Hanja (even that I can't read either they have
> different appearence). But due to nature of Hangul of being basically
> arranged syllables out of Jamo we need to include whole 111712
> precomposed Hangul. And since even important font rendering engines
> prefered to stay away from Jamo composing except when with historical
> Jamo I feel like it would be inappropriate to make it in GRUB.
> As for Kanji we could stick to Jōyō kanji
> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C5%8Dy%C5%8D_kanji] (I think we can
> reasonably suppose that all kanji needed for grub2 are within the school
> scope)
> However I don't pretend to be expert in either Kanji, Hanja, Hangul or
> Hanzi, so feel free to correct me.
>   

I am pretty sure there are a lot of options. But at this point,
I think I need a clear plan on 1) what pixel sizes, 2) what
the number of Hanzi characters and 3) what font styles (song/hei)
does grub project need.

In my previous emails, I summarized the resources that
I know of, including
1) free pan-unifont vector fonts that cover most CJK/nonCJK scripts
2) bitmap fonts that have CJK coverage at smaller font sizes
3) a procedure to produce better quality rasterization from vector
   fonts using fontforge

With these, I think you can pretty much do any combination/slicing
you want. I would be glad help to make these bitmap fonts once
you decide the specs on the fonts (listed above)

> Are there any reasons to believe more sinograms came into general usage
> and may be used by grub since then? Will have anyway to have
> computer-specific glyphs too.
>   
no, I don't think so. Ideographic characters are
quite stable now. For general usage, the charset is
fixed. What get evolved are their combinations,
which we called "words", for example, "电脑"，"手机".
All these characters are ancient, but the combinations
represent something new.

> Is the list you provided about Traditional or Simplified Chinese? What
> about the other variant?
>   

IICore is a combination of simplified/traditional/japanese/korean.

http://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&sl=zh-CN&tl=en&u=http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%25E5%259C%258B%25E9%259A%259B%25E8%25A1%25A8%25E6%2584%258F%25E6%2596%2587%25E5%25AD%2597%25E6%25A0%25B8%25E5%25BF%2583&prev=_t&rurl=translate.google.com&twu=1&usg=ALkJrhiQIu8BQBujT7zze99y_BlwfOCxZQ

> General-usage fonts are good since they are likely to contain all useful
> (for GRUB) glyphs. It just starts to look that we can't significantly
> reduce the size of unifont by removing not-so-useful glyphs. 10000 for
> Simplified Chinese, 10000 for Traditional Chinese and 10000 for Hangul
> and we already have half of BMP/unifont
>   

Maybe start with full BMP and see if you have any particular
difficulties coming up. Re-slice a BDF file is quite eazy.