Re: Cyrillic fonts

From: Fred Clare <fredclare_at_nyahnyahspammersnyahnyah>
Date: Mon, 01 Dec 2008 12:46:51 -0700

On Dec 1, 2008, at 12:16 AM, Mikhail Itkin wrote:

> Hi,
>
> The current version of PyNGL has font tables set which includes
> complex_cyrillic font as the only cyrillic one. The PyNGL font
> approach works flawlessly but unfortunately the complex_cyrillic
> font looks far from modern fonts. If i understand it right it's
> rather a set of scientific symbols then a normal font set. Currently
> images with text in English looks way better then the ones with
> Russian inscriptions.
>
> Is it possible to add a font table with another Sans or Serif-Sans
> cyrillic font, for example free Bit Stream or DejaVu? It would help
> a lot in producing high-quality graphs with PyNGL. If necessary i
> could assist in creating such (if my knowledge level will allow that).

Mikhail,

The Cyrillic glyphs (NCL font "complex_cyrillic") are based on
stroked characters produced by A.V. Hershey in the 1960s. There
is no doubt that a quality upgrade would be in order, but
currently there is no mechanism within our package for easy
access to user supplied Type 1 or TrueType fonts. The only way
to add a new font now is to produce a font database (fontcap)
that our font utilities can read. While this is possible, it is
not practical. To get an idea as to what might be involved, see:

  http://ncarg.ucar.edu/supplements/cgm_supp/cgm_supp.html#HDR19

The fontcap files come in two varieties: stroked and filled.
The filled font definitions were added in the early 1990s
and several font databases were added then--all fonts with
numbers greater than or equal to 21 in:

  http://www.ncl.ucar.edu/Document/Graphics/font_tables.shtml

In general these are higher quality than the stroked fonts.

We are working toward integrating a package into our products
(cairo) that will provide a lot of functionality of long-standing
request, among which would be access to Type 1 and TrueType
fonts. This is still in the future with no assigned release date
(probably a year off).

Regards,

Fred Clare

>
>
> Cheers,
> Mikhail
>
> --
> Mikhail Itkin
> mailto: itkin.m_at_gmail.com
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Received on Mon Dec 01 2008 - 12:46:51 MST

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