Quote:
Originally Posted by DaleDe
Fonts are in ROM and they take up more room than you might think after taking car of bold, italics, bold italic, normal and all the special characters. UTF-8 is about 100K characters. I am not aware of any font that has them all.
Dale
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they don't take up *that* much space... as an example, i looked at 2 fonts : Times New Roman (this is the font used by firefox to display the book with the phonetic glyphs, and i know it is a very complete fontface as far as glyphs go), and Avenir.
Times New Roman Fontface has 7 variant fonts in it. each file is only around 35ko, and all together they weigh 243 ko.
Avenir must have fewer glyphs, because an individual font file only weighs around 29ko, however there are 12 variants, and altogether (all 12 of them !) they weigh only 330ko !!
how much (or how little...) rom can these things really have, that they can't spare a few hundred ko for a decent typeface ? especially since in these devices, i think we only really need 4 variants : regular, bold, italic, and bold italic. taking Times as an example, that's only 137ko !
i imagine we could not support every glyph known to man (like, maybe we couldn't have arabic fonts on there, or japanese kana), and i don't know exactly what is encompassed by UTF-8 or whether that charset is necessary / good / better, but as i say, with Times New Roman alone the most "common among the uncommon" would definitely be covered, including all accented characters found in european languages and (as demonstrated) the characters necessary for transcribing phonetic spellings. this seems like a pretty good start to me, and i don't see why it could not be possible. plus, the serif font on there right now is kinda clunky. it would be nice to have a different one.