[mythtv-theming] What fonts are guaranteed to be on a Linux box?

Yeechang Lee ylee at pobox.com
Thu Aug 22 19:11:31 UTC 2013


Jim Stichnoth <stichnot at gmail.com> says:
> Sorry for potentially derailing the thread, but can you give more
> details about the font issues you found in the default set?  If the
> issues are technical, it would be nice to fix them in the defaults.

Not derailing it at all; I'd say captions count as part of the theme,
especially given the introduction of osd_subtitle.xml. You're also
right in that any fixes ought to be generalized whenever possible. And
given that I have the developers who's done the most work on MythTV
captions on the line ...

That said, I am not sure if the cause is necessarily OSD/theme-related
per se, or even with MythTV at all. I use two 0.26 frontends, one
Linux and one OS X. With the stock/fallback osd_subtitle.xml, both the
FreeMono and Droid Sans Mono fonts behave badly on the OS X frontend
(whether Jean-Yves' standalone or the MacPorts one). With FreeMono,
some punctuation marks are either partially obscured (question mark)
or don't appear at all (apostrophe, period). With Droid Sans Mono,
they appear but parts are cut off, as are other letters, notably the
capital W and capital O.

Similar behavior occurs with other free mono fonts I've tested,
Liberation, DejaVu, and Ubuntu. Only the proprietary Bitstream Vera
Sans Mono--that Liberation and DejaVu are clones of--seems to appear
correctly on OS X, but of course we can't distribute it. Since, as I
mentioned, this only seems to occur on OS X, it's quite possibly an
Apple-specific font-rendering issue.

> If it's more of a style choice, I would suggest making no assumptions and
> packaging them all with the theme.

Yes, if I can find a free font that works OK on both platforms (which
I presume 99% of MythTV users are on), I'll include it with the
Mythbuntu theme.

-- 
Yeechang Lee <ylee at pobox.com> | San Francisco


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