Limit on Number of Characters in Font-File

[ThomasG]

Summary of the bug:

Since I'm a big fan of the classic gmplayer interface, and also of Japanese movies, I created a font file with all "Standard" Kanji, and a corresponding image file for the Blue Skin:

​http://www.thomasx.de/download/font.fnt
​http://www.thomasx.de/download/font-pl.png

Which basically works, but not all characters are loaded when running the standart gmplayer binary. For that I also have to increase EXTRA_CHRS in gui/skin/font.h to some value that is higher than the number of chars in the font file. I set it to 3000 in my case, then the Japanese font file works as expected.

How to reproduce:

Run gmplayer on a file with a Japanese name like "日本の映画.mkv" with the appropriate font.fnt and font-pl.png in the "Blue" skin.

So it now basically "works for me", but perhaps users of the standard binary also would like to use font files with more than 128 non-ascii characters.

Kind regards

Thomas

[ib]

Your point that there shouldn't be a limitation of 128 non-ascii characters is a good one.

Concerning the font image file: Could you please give information about the font the Japanese glyphs have been taken from, so that I can add the font's licensing note.

[ThomasG]

Hello,

Thanks for the feedback.

The Glyps where created using the IPAGothic Font from the otf-ipafont Archlinux Packages.

​https://www.archlinux.org/packages/community/any/otf-ipafont/

Original IPA License:

​http://ipafont.ipa.go.jp/ipa_font_license_v1-html#en

[ib]

I'm not a lawyer but I'm afraid the license doesn't allow adding the glyphs to an MPlayer's font image file. IMHO articles 2.4 and 3.1.(3) apply. (If someone knows better please speak up.)

There's another problem with the glyphs - they are too large (although I understand that making them smaller wouldn't make any sense). The skin is designed for glyphs having a height of 12 pixels where at least one top pixel and one bottom pixel have to be blank. Although larger ones will get rendered, they do overwrite other skin items (see Blue's playbar, for example).

I'll abolish the limitation of 256 characters in the font description files, but in order to distribute a font image file with Japanese characters we'd have to a) find one under GPL license or a license that allows extraction and b) adjust the skin. (If you're aware of such a font and are still interested please contact me on the mailing list prior to generating glyphs from it.)

[ThomasG]

Unfortunately I'm not a lawyer neither.

But I think the scope of the ticket should be only "raise the limit of characters that are possible in skin fonts" anyway, not generating a specific new font file.

On that front I tried making them smaller, but neither there nor on the license front I had much success yet. I found a few old DOS/X11 bitmap fonts that might be promising, if I dig up anything I will post that on the mailing list.

[ib]

Fixed in svn r37893.