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Very unfortunate that Arial font is not standard on all offiicial kodi skins so that international users can enjoy the same skins as everyone else. In some cases u cant even manually add it through an addon. Might be possible to add through some backdoor way in the xml files...but thats beyond me.
Very sad.
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I don't understand what you are asking or commenting on.
Why do you need Arial, and what do you mean by International Users? Are you implying that there are two versions of Kodi and Skins? One for (I assume) Americans, and one for the rest of the world?
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I am noting that not all the skins pre-loaded (for lack of a better word - such as Eminence Estuary,Estuchy etc) Not all of these have arial based fonts as an option. The reason I need arial is that I am Middle Eastern and anything written in Arabic or Chinese (which I am also fluent in) simply does not show up within some of the skins. You either get a blank or squares where the letters should be. Sorry I dont have a screenshot to show what I mean. So as someone with Arabic music and videos ..i cant actually see any of the titles of albums, songs or movies..just the year (in the case of videos) LOL.
So I am not implying there are 2 versions of each skin but for some of the skins pre-loaded into Kodi simply make it impossible for someone from the Middle East or China to use. Given how many millions of people those two groups makeup in the world today its unfortunate that we cannot use some of the skins and have a legible practical library of music or videos like everyone else. Our only option is to find skins that have Arial as an option (and as I said not all skins do).
I find this unfortunate and actually for those that create the skins may end up excluding ALOT of people from using their skins...including me. Hopefully Kodi will require arial to be preloaded in all skins so that all people from all nations can use all the skins not just a subset of skins - that's all.
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ronie
Team-Kodi Member
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there are only 2 skins included in kodi: Estuary & Estouchy.
both of them have the option to select the Arial font.
i agree that all skins should have that option though.
you can always request it in the subforum for that skin.
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Hitcher
Team-Kodi Member
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The problem is alignment if you're using different sizes in a single line - get it prefect for your main font, switch to a different one and they're no longer aligned.
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braz
Skilled Skinner
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I was able to get about 10 fonts, supporting a variety of languages, to look pretty good in Mimic. The real tricky part was text boxes, where the space between lines varies widely between fonts.
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Hitcher I can completely understand what ur saying. I am a perfectionist as well. From a design point of view even the slightest awkward looking panel would eat at me. What I would say and this is just my thoughts are ...first, I am very appreciative of all the work that any developer puts in to make our experience and enjoyable one - sincerely. I commend and applaud anyone who takes time out of their schedule to do something for free for someone else. It speaks volumes about a person's character in my opinion.
The only thing I would note just as a food for thought for skin developers. If there is a small issue related to something like you have presented above - it MAY be worth adding in the font but noting in the description that there may end up being a few small quirks related to presentation should the end user decide to use a font that is not 100% applicable. That way we could make our decision as to whether or not the imperfections are enough to use a different skin or stay with the one we have including its imperfections. Granted you only provided a small example and perhaps it looks worse in other parts of skins, but i would take a small imperfection like the one above any day over having 75% of my library simply appear as blanks outside of the dates which is usually in English.
Having said that I do realize there are enough skins out there to choose between. I am only trying to point out that for some of us who find these skins rather amazing pieces of creativity, its a little disappointing that we have a smaller subset to choose between because they are all so good!
Still, I hope developers can go back and explore the possibility of potentially adding Arial font to all skins not only for the benefit of the user but as I said, there are alot of us who have foreign based libraries where the fonts really only work with arial.
Thanks for your example - its helpful to see an example of why a font may or may not be included in a skin.
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That supplied arial.ttf is missing a bunch of unicode blocks so it isn't that great, though no doubt a 95% solution. The real question for me is why default to a latin-1-centric font? Is memory for storage of fonts really that big a problem? Or maybe what's needed is a way to implement composite fonts like windows does, so additional unicode blocks can be loaded on demand. I'm not sure how Google's Noto Sans font family works, but I'm guessing it does this on Android.
scott s.
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jjd-uk
Team-Kodi Member
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There has been mention within the Team about whether we should have font resource add-ons which would be usable by skins, then each skin wouldn't need to include the font file, however there is no definite plan for anything yet.
