WIP Roboto Fonts for Skin, CAPS/Bold/Regular Multilanguage support.
#16
I checked the font with Hebrew. Looks OK at first sight.

I found some interesting sources for all types of fonts:
http://www.wazu.jp/

Of course we don't need all. Most importantly (to cover our currently used localizations) we need:
Arabic, Amharic(Ethiop), Greek, Hebrew, Chinese (Simplified, Traditional), Vietnamese, Japanese, Devanagari (Hindi), Korean, Cyrilic for slavic languages, Malayalam, Persian, Thai, Khmer, Bengali

Hell of a job :-)

Do you think you can help in putting these together ? If not, just tell me. I know it is not an easy thing.

Just let me know!

ps.: I found a mosly complete bitmap font, which looks ugly, but for verification it could be useful: http://unifoundry.com/unifont.html
Always read the XBMC online-manual, FAQ and search the forum before posting.
Do not e-mail XBMC-Team members directly asking for support. Read/follow the forum rules.
For troubleshooting and bug reporting please make sure you read this first.
Reply
#17
Already covered from that list...

Arabic, Amharic(Ethiop), Greek, Hebrew, Chinese (Simplified, Traditional), Vietnamese, Japanese, Devanagari (Hindi), Korean, Cyrilic for slavic languages, Malayalam, Persian, Thai, Khmer, Bengali

I tried adding Japanese And most of those languages with funny glyphs today but it wont come up the font is in sources in download I added all characters which makes big file and Im sure adding 12485 characters its going to break something just for Japanese support. (see the font in source folder for Japanese...

The Droidsansfallback has all Chinese and Japanese characters and Thai maybe that font can be modified and used standalone...

I sure could use a hand in finding Sans fonts which have the needed characters and are Licensing open to mods. AN dperhaps find out exactly how to add 200Chars to a font and mappings and make it all be activated. in Fontcreator. Im wrestling with it lol.

Well get it done somehow. Thx for those fonts Ill have a look.

Let me know what the testing yields pls cause I dont speak Hebrew... Shalom Wink

uNi
Reply
#18
@alanwww1

Any feedback on this?

uNi
Reply
#19
If Roboto-Light and Roboto-Thin were added we could use them for celestium.
Reply
#20
If some testing was done to existing enhancements on the fonts included so far it would help future fonts being added Wink I cnat promise either way but sure would help.

uNi
Reply
#21
I can only test English so I'm not much help there.
Reply
#22
French with accents and whoever else show up and if look ok... German, Hungarian is done + French is one Roboto caps Greek Hebrew Roboto Regular. and Roboto Bold
@Hitcher if you can rope a few Hebrew p to test the current beta Hebrew chars that need testing as on all three fonts.

Ideally if all is correct then adding more support should going easy, just have to find the doner fonts which are fonts I can snatch the characters from others to transplant.
Its a lot of work but without seing them in action and see how they woork adding others should make it easy, for Sure though along job.!

uNi
Reply
#23
how to change to khmer language?
Reply
#24
Might be of interest regarding japanese

http://mplus-fonts.sourceforge.jp/mplus-...ex-en.html
My skins:

Amber
Quartz

Reply
#25
@uNiversal,

Thanks for adding Hebrew, working great for me with the Bello skin. Smile

Edit: I gave it another look and it seems to me that Hebrew wasn't added to Roboto-Bold.tff yet, I failed to find where the font is used on the Bello skin but Roboto-Regular.tff is great. (Edit 2: Used for addons compatibility)
For Confluence I used Roboto-Regular.tff as replacement for both the Roboto fonts and it looks good to me.
Reply
#26
@uNiversal

I'm considering reverting your work on Hebrew support and merging:
* Roboto-Regular with DroidSansHebrew-Regular.
* Roboto-Bold with DroidSansHebrew-Bold.
I'm already testing the merged fonts, probably re-merge them again (I didn't used the font's from Confulence repository).

It looks to me that you didn't just merged the fonts.
I don't think I will make other customizations as fonts or graphics edit isn't quite my cup of tea.
I will make sure only the Hebrew gylph are merged.

Testing will be made on Linux x86_64, Raspberry Pi and Windows.
Any recommendation on editing the fonts or what to check when testing the fonts ?

My goal is to PR this to Confluence repository after I'll get some feedback from users.

Edit: Here's a link to the updated fonts
https://github.com/xbmc-il/xbmc-hebrew-fonts
Reply
#27
I never merged the fonts because the result may not be as expected, like what would happen to the characters that already exist, idk by no means do I know anything significant in font development to make a definitive comment..

Im glad that the Hebrew stuff I added worked, but ultimately the lack of feedback and because I dont speak or write Hebrew, Japanese etc meant I could proceed any further. I documented exactly what fonts had fixes and which had Added languages.

I copied and pasted characters and tweak them to match thickness etc, then I activated the character set so that the new characters were properly recognised without this only mappings with respective characters are added, so the characters sets need to be activated. This is a process I no longer remember off the top of my head.

The software I used was great for how I was doing it, now with merging who knows.

Thanks for continuing up on this.
Reply
#28
Thanks uNiversaI for the response.

I'm using FontForge to merge the fonts and I didn't encountered any issue with XBMC for both Latin and Hebrew.

I quite like the result, I don't see a reason to change the glyphs' thickness (or height),
it looks fine to me on XBMC gui and changing the thickness will force me to also change the spacing.

I think you're right, I have no idea what are the implications of merging the fonts,
I did removed all the non Hebrew glyphs from my Hebrew fonts sources before merging but this doesn't ensure that issues will not arise.

Without diving into typography the best thing to do is to test the fonts for both Hebrew and Latin.

This is only a partial solution as more languages needed to be supported like Arabic, my current fonts doesn't includes the glyphs you added (Japanese and such).
I also must admit I don't like this solution much but this is way better than having Arial (ugly) as secondary fontset or adding fontset for each script.

The best solution will be to get XBMC to be aware of missing glyph in font and to load the missing glyph for specific subset from another font based on the settings in skin's Font.xml.

For the moment I think I will continue to test my custom fonts and probably send a PR (for misc skins) when I think these are ready, I hope these will be included in Gotham.

Anyone who like to test the fonts with Latin is welcome to do so (need to confirm completely that I didn't created issues with Latin), thy are available at https://github.com/xbmc-il/xbmc-hebrew-fonts
Reply
#29
Ya Well the thing is I was trying to add support for all languages in the roboto fonts, not just Hebrew. But this is a tall order by any means. At least you have some interest to proceed, I have none except curiosity since Neither my mother language nor my secondary Languages are Hbrew, Japanese or anything of the sort that the standard fonts dont cover. I merely fixed some issues that were present in fonts and started adding more glyphs as a curiosity and hoping native language speaker would step in and add support for each in the roboto fonts, without sacrificing anything.

Fontforge is not ideal, because in my tests it caused many problems in the font itself. TBH I have no idea how merging is going to work that way. But if it works, it works.
Reply
#30
I wan't sure what is the status of this project so I worked on the Roboto fonts from Confluence Github repository, I didn't saw a reason to work on fonts that I don't know if are good for daily use.
My question is: except the Hebrew glyphs are the updated Roboto fonts are fine and ready to use with confluence ?
if so then my goal should be adding Hebrew glyphs to these fonts.

I played a little more with FontForge adding Hebrew glyphs to BebasNeue, this time manually copying the glyphs and changing the spacing, it doesn't looks so bad doing this work manually, it's much slower and need allot of tweaks but maybe staying on the safe side is wiser.
(the result was splendid but a waste of time because as Bebas licensed with SIL OFL and my Hebrew source licensed with Apache).
I will give FontCreator a shot although I'm trying to avoid using Windows.
Reply

Logout Mark Read Team Forum Stats Members Help
Roboto Fonts for Skin, CAPS/Bold/Regular Multilanguage support.0