Fonts have problems with non-latin characters

[Hans Joachim Desserud]

Steps to reproduce:
1. Go to Options.
2. Look through the list of languages available.

The second entry (arabic?) only shows rectangles, and so does a few others further down the list. Based on bug 1289700, we will need font sets for the following languages/scripts:

- Arabic
- Burmese
- Chinese (Traditional)
- Chinese (Simplified)
- Devanagari
- Hebrew
- Korean
- Persian

Way back when this issue was originally reported it used to only affect non-default fonts, but now it seems even the default one has problems with non-latin languages.

Version: bzr rev 5587 on Ubuntu 10.04

[SirVer (sirver)]

I am for removing the font-changing feature. Haven't seen this in any mainstream game before and it is a rather obscure and only partly useful feature imho.

+1 for removing font selection!

[Nasenbaer (nasenbaer)]

Actually it is the different way around!
There is *no* open source font, that covers all glyphs (even our default) - try some of the asian languages.

That's the first point why that feature was introduced - to enable the user to use a different font, so they can read the texts and not just blocks.

the other point is, that the serif font is hard to read on very small resolutions - that's why it is a good idea, to have the SansSerif font. It's e.g. used on the Nokia (what ever the number was?) port.

So a strong -1 for removing :) - even more a +1 for enabling that function widelands wide (currently only the menus use that font).

Another alternative: find a font, that contains all glyphs. :) I would be lucky if there was one :).

[Nasenbaer (nasenbaer)]

Here is some more information about the free fonts (ours are already quite outdated, but our version was still GPL v.2 licensed - the newer one is GPL v.3 and thus not compatible, if we want to release Widelands under GPL v.2)

http://www.gnu.org/software/freefont/coverage.html

Unfortunally it is quite obvious, that the current implementation of that feature is incomplete - although a chinese guy is able to see the menu in chinese glyphs (if adding a chinese font manually to the font directory), the building names, messages and so on will all keep using the FreeSerif Font.

So I think it would be good to introduce it in the whole code - something like a variable set via the options menu (defaulting to FreeSerif) that can be used from every part of the code and the font renderer just knows which font it has to load.

Further something like "Try system sans serif font" (like the "try system language" ) would be very useful - so no manual installation of the font would be needed.

Anyways, the point is: If we want to support the whole bunch of languages that already have (at least partly translated) po files on launchpad, we must care about the readability of those languages. I think there was another bug report somewhere about right to left texts....

[Hans Joachim Desserud (hjd)]

I guess the bug about right-to-left texts Nasenbaer is thinking about, is bug 590874.

[SirVer (sirver)]

Okay, I wonder now how other games handle this? E.g. wesnoth? I talked with nicolai before that we should really switch to using pango[1] as wesnoth did - I guess it will be able to handle international texts much better than our current system. That might be the *right solution* (TM) for this problem, but some investigation is needed for this. And the implementation is maybe non trivial.

[1] http://www.pango.org/

[Hans Joachim Desserud (hjd)]

Updated description a bit to match the current situation

[Hans Joachim Desserud (hjd)]

GunChleoc mentioned in bug 1289700:
"If the SIL font license is compatible, we could get some nice fonts from http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&id=FontDownloads"

[SirVer (sirver)]

Setting to incomplete for bug sweeping.

[GunChleoc (gunchleoc)]

Fixed in build19-rc1.