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Basic character set analyzer [message #19546]

Sat, 13 December 2008 11:26

cbpporter
Messages: 1401
Registered: September 2007

Ultimate Contributor

Before starting to write a text output method capable of font substitution, using a little program to see what fonts contain which characters is a good idea (Mirek's idea).

I've already gotten a lot of valuable information from this little program, so if anybody want to give it a try, run it and post it's result here (or as PM if you don't want to fill up the space here) so I can tell if my assumptions hold out for different versions of Linux, that would be great. I would like to see results both from people who just installed a normal Linux, never bothering to look over the font list and from people who have a localized version of Linux or who manually installed a font to be able to use non English characters.

The program covers code ranges from Basic Latin to Arabic. I did not go any farther yet, because clearly a better interface and way to present information is needed (I'm thinking tables, ranges and percents vs. current character list). But this will be enough to verify my assumptions and write a basic method which will handle for now only the above code ranges.

PS:
To make this work, you are going to have to add this to Draw/Draw.h in FontInfo declaration:

bool       HasChar(int codePoint);
bool       HasCharRange(int startCp, int endCp);
bool       CharRangeEmpty(int startCp, int endCp);

and this to Draw/DrawText.cpp:

bool FontInfo::HasChar(int codePoint)
{
	return XftCharExists(Xdisplay, ptr->xftfont, codePoint);
}

bool FontInfo::HasCharRange(int startCp, int endCp)
{
	for (int i = startCp; i <= endCp; i++)
		if (!XftCharExists(Xdisplay, ptr->xftfont, i))
		    return false;
	return true;
}

bool FontInfo::CharRangeEmpty(int startCp, int endCp)
{
	for (int i = startCp; i <= endCp; i++)
		if (XftCharExists(Xdisplay, ptr->xftfont, i))
		    return false;
	return true;
}

These methods are not final, so add them only for the purpose of running this test.

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