[sldev] UTF-8 open source fonts

[Alissa Sabre]

> A little more research revealed that different people with  clients on 
> different OS's or even the same OS show different subsets of chars.

It is true.

Currently SL viewer uses OS supplied font files for shwoing non
Latin-1 characters.  Not all OS installation have a complete set of
required font files.

I agree it is a problem.

> The problem appears to be that the included ASCII fonts are supplemented 
> on-the-fly with whatever is available on the local OS, but whatever 
> algorithm is being used to choose those supplemental characters doesn't 
> always work.

I'm not sure what you mean by "doesn't always work".  I believe I
understand what's happening under the current implementation.  It is
very simple scheme.  Unless a user customized the settings, SL viewer
uses per-OS fixed ordered list of font files to try, and it searches
for a character (or a glyph, if you prefer this wording) in the given
list of font files.

This mechanism always works as expected.  The problem is that the
expectation is that of the developer, as opposed to of the users...

> Linden Labs should standardize on existing open source unicode fonts 
> such as those found here:
> 
> http://www.unifont.org/fontguide/

I don't think "LL should".  It is reasonable that an application
program to rely on the OS supplied font files.

In practice, I know no usable free-of-charge Chinese or Japanese
fonts.  Yes, there are some suggestions on the page you referred to,
but the Chinese fonts available there have lower quality than those
supplied by Apple as part of MacOS distribution.

I'm not eligible to evaluate the quality of typography for other
scripts, but I don't expects high-quality free-of-charge fonts are
available for many minor scripts, either.

I don't want to bound SL to such low quality fonts.

> a known 
> multi-language set of fonts will always be available in any SL distribution.

I agree this is a good thing, however.  

So, I'd like to suggest that future SL viewer distribution to
contain more font files either free-of-charge fonts or LL could buy
licenses of selected commercial fonts.  It will fain "world-wide
compatibility" of SL viewer.  However, I also suggest that unless the
SL viewer bundled fonts are high quality ones, those fonts should be
considered as a _last_resort_, and SL viewer should use OS supplied
font files wherever they are available.

    Alissa Sabre
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