Request: Special font support

[zenmonkey]

I've been trying to figure out how to post in some of the rarer alphabets that I've worked on and I'm currently looking into (Rashi and Solitreo scripts, but also Hebrew cursive, Estrangela, Herodian, Imperial Aramaic, etc...) It would be fantastic if we could extend the forum to include support for fonts.

Looking into it, this does not seem to be too complicated and let me suggest the following:

1) a bbcode that would be [ font=xxx ] text goes here [/font=xxx ] where the font would reference a CSS style
- this is outlined here :
https://www.phpbb.com/support/docs/en/3 ... in-phpbb3/
https://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtop ... &t=1931165

2) Users that wanted to see the special font, just need to install it on their PC - otherwise the text would revert to the browsers default fonts. In order to do so, we could keep a thread pointing to a list of fonts used.

For example, this should be in Reshi script, but comes out in Standard Hebrew:

אגדדהעח

while it should look like this:

Screen Shot 2015-08-04 at 21.17.34.png

And just for clarity - I know we have a virtual keyboard for IPA and other characters - font support is for how those characters are shown.

[daegga]

2) Users that wanted to see the special font, just need to install it on their PC - otherwise the text would revert to the browsers default fonts. In order to do so, we could keep a thread pointing to a list of fonts used.

Wouldn't it be possible to use web fonts instead?

[emk]

I've been trying to figure out how to post in some of the rarer alphabets that I've worked on and I'm currently looking into (Rashi and Solitreo scripts, but also Hebrew cursive, Estrangela, Herodian, Imperial Aramaic, etc...) It would be fantastic if we could extend the forum to include support for fonts.

This feels like a whole bunch of complicated questions wrapped up into one, and I would like to think through the implications a bit first.

First, I'd like to propose a general design principal: Ideally, this site should have the ability to display any writing system supported by Unicode, and be able to do so conveniently and with good performance. Non-Unicode languages would probably need to be dealt with on a case-by-case basis. I mean, there's no reason we couldn't support even far-out things like the Manuel de codage for Egyptian if there were sufficient demand.


(a dynamically generated image using Gardiner codes and the MdC, but there's no BBCode for this right now!)

But good Unicode support is a respectable baseline, I think.

For example, if there are open source webfonts that we ought install, I'm willing to discuss it with rdearman, as long as it doesn't kill download times. Or if we needed to add new font names to our site wide CSS override to ensure good results with a particular Unicode block, we could probably do that, too.

2) Users that wanted to see the special font, just need to install it on their PC - otherwise the text would revert to the browsers default fonts. In order to do so, we could keep a thread pointing to a list of fonts used.

Hmm. This requires a writer to pick out fonts, and a reader to download them and install them on their PC. I feel like you might get a bigger audience by posting images of interesting writing styles, perhaps? Also, a lot of us read on mobile devices, which don't usually allow installing local fonts.

On the other hand, images can be a pain to prepare and upload.

[zenmonkey]

2) Users that wanted to see the special font, just need to install it on their PC - otherwise the text would revert to the browsers default fonts. In order to do so, we could keep a thread pointing to a list of fonts used.

Wouldn't it be possible to use web fonts instead?

Absolutely - we could also put the fonts in the host server:

as an example the CSS would then have:

Code: Select all

@charset "utf-8";
 @font-face {
    font-family: 'Journal';
       src: url('http://your-own.site/fonts/journal/journal.woff') format('woff'),
       url('http://your-own.site/fonts/journal/journal.svg#Journal') format('svg'),
       url('http://your-own.site/fonts/journal/journal.ttf') format('truetype'),
       url('http://your-own.site/fonts/journal/journal.eot'),
       url('http://your-own.site/fonts/journal/journal.eot?#iefix') format('embedded-opentype');
    font-weight: normal;
    font-style: normal;
 }

[zenmonkey]

I've been trying to figure out how to post in some of the rarer alphabets that I've worked on and I'm currently looking into (Rashi and Solitreo scripts, but also Hebrew cursive, Estrangela, Herodian, Imperial Aramaic, etc...) It would be fantastic if we could extend the forum to include support for fonts.

This feels like a whole bunch of complicated questions wrapped up into one, and I would like to think through the implications a bit first.

First, I'd like to propose a general design principal: Ideally, this site should have the ability to display any writing system supported by Unicode, and be able to do so conveniently and with good performance. Non-Unicode languages would probably need to be dealt with on a case-by-case basis. I mean, there's no reason we couldn't support even far-out things like the Manuel de codage for Egyptian if there were sufficient demand.


(a dynamically generated image using Gardiner codes and the MdC, but there's no BBCode for this right now!)

But good Unicode support is a respectable baseline, I think.

For example, if there are open source webfonts that we ought install, I'm willing to discuss it with rdearman, as long as it doesn't kill download times. Or if we needed to add new font names to our site wide CSS override to ensure good results with a particular Unicode block, we could probably do that, too.

2) Users that wanted to see the special font, just need to install it on their PC - otherwise the text would revert to the browsers default fonts. In order to do so, we could keep a thread pointing to a list of fonts used.

Hmm. This requires a writer to pick out fonts, and a reader to download them and install them on their PC. I feel like you might get a bigger audience by posting images of interesting writing styles, perhaps? Also, a lot of us read on mobile devices, which don't usually allow installing local fonts.

On the other hand, images can be a pain to prepare and upload.

I think your "general design principal" works - either supporting existing unicode blocks or adding, case by case, a CSS override font (open source) to assure good visualisation.

Web fonts, like daega suggested, would probably resolve a lot of the issues - no downloading or install needed as they are embedded into the stylesheet.

Here is the thing: unicode has a block for Syriac - if your browser is set up to support it - you'll see East Syraic, maybe:

ܐܣܛܪܢܓܠܐ

But this is quite different to read than West or Estrangela



Anyway - I'll get my thoughts organised on this and perhaps propose something a little more structured, based on this discussion.
It would certainly be interesting if we ha a place where people could actually write directly in these styles - pretty unique plus!

[Zireael]

UniLang, again, has excellent support for Arabic/Urdu and CJK (Chinese/Japanese/Korean).

As for fonts, in my programming ventures I discovered Droid Sans/Droid Sans Fallback cover nearly everything I could need out of Unicode, including CJK.