[sualfred]

Hey mates,

a well known international problem: special characters, asian, greek, and other language specific symbols.

Currently I'm using the Ubuntu, which already has a great support for the most signs (except a star symbol for EPG included ratings).

Can somebody suggest me other ones which are non serif? Fonts that have a few different ones to cover asian languages but have the same letter spacing would be great.

And they have to be free to be used.

(Please don't say Arial ^^)

[whysoserious]

Hey mates,

a well known international problem: special characters, asian, greek, and other language specific symbols.

Currently I'm using the Ubuntu, which already has a great support for the most signs (except a star symbol for EPG included ratings).

Can somebody suggest me other ones which are non serif? Fonts that have a few different ones to cover asian languages but have the same letter spacing would be great.

And they have to be free to be used.

(Please don't say Arial ^^)

Can't go wrong with Comic Sans... :-)

[sualfred]

I knew somebody will play the Comic Sans card 

[Hitcher]

https://www.google.com/get/noto/?

[sualfred]

@Hitcher 

Yeah, I know. Switched to it already. But the font is not the beautiest one. And the CJK packages are so damn big. I was hoping to find a alternative.

[scott967]

Came across this thread.  In my experience noto sans has the widest coverage and I don't see it that much different style from some of the earlier ones it was derived from.  The problem I have with it is that google has the font broken up into language packs and I find it impossible to merge into a single ttf font. I guess the google intent is the html requests a language/script and browser loads appropriate font.

But regardless of coverage Kodi font rendering implementation has some issues that limit what you can do.  A couple that I have grappled with are
1.  Kodi uses the max bounding box (union of all bounding boxes for all characters in the CMAP) to determine the font scaling/positioning.  As a result if you add a character with a large ascender/descender it will resize all your characters based on that.
2.  Kodi doesn't have the rendering capability to properly display indic scripts.  The basic problem is that you can render the character using the font's CMAP but in Indic characters are modified based on their positions within syllables.
3.  Kodi doesn't really provide for designating scripts used.  Mostly an issue for simplified/traditional Chinese but also for some languages there are options for Latin or Cyrillic scripts.  For Chinese there's a work around of using TW to mean traditional and CN to mean simplified.

scott s.
.

[sualfred]

Yes, I guess I will keep Noto Sans and Arial as fallback font.
Arial also has a similar rendering output for your mentioned scaling/positioning if a linespacing of 1.18 and aspect of 0.95 will be used. So mostly no strange cropped labels and different required heights of textboxes, etc.

It's just a little pita that especially CJK users will have broken letters on the first skin startup and they can't read anything. As workaround I've added a little check on the boot and first skin load:

Code:


<onload condition="!Skin.HasSetting(FontCheck)">RunScript(script.embuary.helper,action=fontchange,locales=ja+zh+ar+he+ko+vi+bn+my+hi+ks+km+ms,font=Arial)</onload>
<onload condition="!Skin.HasSetting(FontCheck)">Skin.ToggleSetting(FontCheck)</onload>


Based on the OS locale it will switch to Arial as fallback for one time. Better then nothing and will solve the most issues.