[kimp93]

XBMC supports two fonts FrancophilSans and arial for PM3 skin and arial for subtitle. There are no support for bold and italic which handle by freetype I think. Most importantly they don't support any non-latin unicode (even some latins as well).

It has been recommended to use arialuni.ttf for unicode and that is why many skins have font sets for arial. arialuni.ttf is MS copyrighted font, so it can not be include in the XBMC. Normally users copy the font from their Windows and OS X installation. It is not only a hassle to do but also quite difficult, since some skins don't have a font-set for arial.

So, I suggested to support system fonts before.
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=45918

A better solution is the having fonts that support styles and unicode in XBMC. I'd like suggest to include Droid font family in XBMC.

Google made a Droid font family for their Android platform. Fonts are made by Ascender which is the company also made Arial and Time New Roman for MS. The Droid font family has serif, san-serif, and mono typefaces. They are quite modern and nice and are released under the Apache license. So, they are free to use, distribute, and modify. There is a no legal issue to include Droid fonts in XBMC.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droid_(font)

Fonts are available here.

http://android.git.kernel.org/?p=platfor...data/fonts

They also designed for small memory foot print as well. (Arialuni.ttf is 22MB, Droidfallback.ttf is only 3MB) So these fonts should be good for xbox users as well.

Skin designers can make a use of modern and better default fonts and international users can use XBMC right out of box.

One other suggestion is font fallback mechanism which XBMC do not have currently as far as I know. If XBMC include the Droid fonts, whatever glyphs not available in a specified font can be fallback to DroidFallBack.ttf which support almost all font codes.

[bb10]

Post a trac ticket if you haven't done so yet.

I've tried DroidSansFallback.ttf instead of arial.ttf and it looks like it supports most unicode characters.

[kimp93]

I created a ticket on the trac.
http://trac.xbmc.org/ticket/6226

[kimp93]

Let me copy what I wrote in trac ticket to discuss the topic here as well.


About Droid fonts license Issue

1. Please take a look at the NOTICE and README.txt. They are the official license for those fonts and clearly state as Apache license 2.
Quote from the README.txt

This directory contains the fonts for the platform. They are licensed under the Apache 2 license.

2. Each font has a header stating Apache license 2, if you look at them in any font editor.

3. There is a lengthy discussion on license of those fonts, now it is all sorted out.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=472635

4. Linux distributions are highly sensitive with license issue as you know. There are many linux distributions officially provide Droid font package from the repositories.
There is a even discussion to make Droid fonts to Ubuntu default fonts.



Elaborate Problems


Let me elaborate problems with unicode glyphs and summarize what is happening with Aeon localization.

Currently default skin, PM3 HD has an arial font set which made out of only arial.ttf. So if users just replace the arial.ttf with arialuni.ttf, most unicode problems get solved. However, arialuni.ttf is MS copyrighted font, so can not be included in XBMC svn.

Next popular skin maybe is MediaStream which does have arial font set, however the font set use not just arial.ttf but other non-unicode fonts. So, users have to modify the font set to see the unicode characters properly after the replacing arial.ttf with arialuni.ttf.

New Aeon skin got translated to many languages as it is popular. I also participate to translate into Korean. Since djh_ chose non-unicode fonts for default font-set, whenever people translate the language, they had to make a font-set and fonts as well. Now Aeon has 6 different font-sets and fonts for those font-sets. It will grow more as it gets translated to other languages.

Once again, they are only some examples. Whenever there is a new skin, skin designers and users will have a problem persistently with Unicode characters.

However, problems still don’t disappear with all those many font-sets in Aeon. When, people use English UI with any non-unicode movie/mp3 file names, they simply showed garbled square boxes. Only solution in this case is pan-Unicode font with a font-set. There are not many pan-Unicode fonts even with commercial license. There are only a few pan-Unicode fonts with free-licenses like DejaVu and GNU free fonts. However, they are simply ugly. The only pan-Unicode font with free-license made by professionals is Droid fonts. So XBMC want to support Unicode properly, I think only choice we have is Droid fonts.

p.s. I did not use the term “font fallback” properly. I meant and proper term should be “glyph fallback”.

[kimp93]

s7mx1 made couple of hybrid fonts for pan-unicode.
I'd love to see one of those fonts being in XBMC.

http://xbmc.org/ticket/6397