Matching Fonts to Character Sets

A font contains a set of glyphs used to render the characters of a locale. However, you may also want to do the following for a given locale:

• Determine the fonts needed

• Specify the necessary fonts

• Determine the charset of a font in a resource file

• Choose multiple fonts per locale

The last two fields of a font XFLD identify which glyphs are contained in a font and which value is used to obtain a specific glyph from the set. These last two fields identify the encoding of the glyphs contained in the font.

For example:

-adobe-courier-medium-r-normal--24-240-75-75-m-150-iso8859-1

The last two fields of this XLFD name are iso8859 and 1. These fields specify that the ISO8859-1 standard glyphs are contained in the font. Further, it specifies that the character code values of the ISO8859-1 standard are used to index the corresponding glyph for each character.

The font charset used by the application to render data depends on the locale you select. Because the font charset of the data changes is based on the choice of locale, the font specification must not be hardcoded by the application. Instead, it should be placed in a locale-specific app-defaults file, allowing localized versions of the app-defaults file to be created.

Further, the font should be specified as a fontset. A fontset is an Xlib concept in which an XLFD is used to specify the fonts. The font charset fields of the XLFD are specified by the Xlib code that creates the fontset and fills in these fields based on the locale that the user has specified.

For many languages (such as Japanese, Chinese, and Korean), multiple font charsets are combined to support single encoding. In these cases, multiple fonts must be opened to render the character data. Further, the data must be parsed into segments that correspond to each font, and in some cases, these segments must be transformed to convert the character values into glyphs indexes. The XFontset, which is a collection of all fonts necessary to render character data in a given locale, also deals with this set of problems. Further, a set of rendering and metric routines are provided that internally take care of breaking strings into character-set-consistent segments and transforming values into glyph indexes. These routines relieve the burden of the application developer, who needs only the user fontsets and the new X11R5 rendering and metric application program interfaces (APIs).