Ok, subject says it all. I saw at least one post in the past asking for cyrillic font support (within ASCII 128-255). Anyone fancy a need for that right now?

Bruno

Yeah,

I could use cyrillic fonts. I've got some Alla Pugacheva and others that would be cool to use the original language for.

-Tom

Tom: Do you perhaps happen to have some Bulat Okudzava, too?

Bruno: How about Latin2? The player would have to support some way of specifying the code page to use and switching among them (if we stay at 8 bits)...

Ok, subject says it all. I saw at least one post in the past asking for cyrillic font support (within ASCII 128-255). Anyone fancy a need for that right now?

Yes, I'll take one. How much is it?

Borislav

The person in the original thread (I'll have to apologise for not going to look it up right now) just wanted the ability to replace the latin accented characters with cyrillic instead. They were aware that the player currently didn't have support for codepages.

I can make the font, but I can't do anything about a prgrammatic way to toggle between different sets. You'd have to choose between one set or the other. Which is fine for some people I suppose, but not for others.

I don't know how one would propose to implement code pages. I suppose the guys could add a tag in emplode that would specify the font set.

Let's get a bit more feedback on the desire for cyrillic in the first place and then I'll take the initial step of creating the font. Anything related to implementation (beyond a swap as I mentioned) will rest in the hands of our good friends at empeg.

Now, the $25000 question: What compromises a Latin2 character set?

Bruno

Well, my wife is Russian, and does have a fair amount of Russian music encoded. We both officially got our empeg's yesterday (I was waiting until FedEx delivered the 2nd unit before I gave her the first unit as a late Christmas present).

I can't say we'd suffer without it, but if Cyrillic support were available, we could make use of it. Though the idea of having Cyrillic as the only display font might be problematic.

Well, it would be cyrillic from ASCII 128 to 255. The base 128 would still contain the roman characters. Maybe with the font available and if enough people want it, the empeg guys can add a property to choose an alternate font on a track-track basis.

Bruno

In reply to:

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if enough people want it, the empeg guys can add a property to choose an alternate font on a track-track basis.

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Perhaps even a Wendy filter that'd allow one to toggle between the two? (Of course, the logical extension of _that_ would be a Wendy filter to toggle between localization of the UI, and that'd be something I'd get a kick out of, since I just spent many hours over the past week with my in-laws in the car.)

Now, the $25000 question: What compromises a Latin2 character set?

There is no shortage of standards for Latin2 character set (as is the case for most other non-ASCII sets): MS-DOS, MSW and ISO . Where do I collect my prize?

I agree with your remarks, of course. Untill somebody (and that pretty much means guys@empeg) devises a way to switch codepages or migrate to full 16-bit Unicode I think I will stick with Latin1, since I don't have that many Croatian or other Latin2 titles and I would not like to sacrifice correct display of umlauts, cedilles etc. Besides, whan I began computing there was only ASCII (and EBCEDIC, FieldData etc - English, in one word), no Latin-this-or-that, so I am used of reading Croatian in 7-bit.

ISO Cyrillic (ISO-8859-5) codepage standard can be found here, among other places (but see also here).
BTW, construction of small empeg Cyrillic font would be quite a challenge, don't you think?

I don't even want to think about the nightmare of creating two (three if you include the BIG visuals) high quality 16bit unicode bitmap fonts suited for the empeg. :)

Creating Latin2 has its challenges too. The empeg medium font (the large non-visuals font) is 9 pixels tall. Capital letters occupy the top 7 pixels. This means that if you want to add accents to capitals, you have to make the those versions shorter. There are all sorts of compromises and considerations to keep everything balanced and working well with both the medium and small fonts (the small is actually using 1 pixel less than the minimum required to represent all lowercase forms - that's why the funky "e" and "s"). The originals did a great job of getting most everything in there, they just needed some tweaking.

Bruno

Nah, but how about high-order support for things like Big-5 or EUC/SJIS/JIS? (aka asian support)

Ed

I am interested as well.
--Andrew
PS: Anyone have any Mango-Mango encoded?

In a couple of words: Not bloody likely. :) If the thought of working on a unicode set to support various latins, cyrillic and perhaps greek made me wince, I'd keel over at contemplation of an asian two-byte set.

That would be a nightmare for the small characters. That would be 5-pixel height to try and cram what can be fairly intricate strokes. I think I would rather do Egyptian Hieroglyphics, thanks. :)

Bruno

In reply to:

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Tom: Do you perhaps happen to have some Bulat Okudzava, too?

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Nope, sorry .

Tom

> I think I would rather do Egyptian Hieroglyphics, thanks.

Already done. Jusy pop a track with double byte ID3 tag
into the player, LOL!

Ed

I'd like to have a cyrillic font as well. Using 128-255 sounds like a good way to do it... then we get latin and cyrillic chars without having to switch char sets per song.

Well obviously you loose all accented characters that now sit between 128 and 255...

I'll see if I can get around to this soon unless someone beats me to it. I still have a few characters to touch up in the standard Latin1 font files. At least with FTP, all the copying is much smoother.

Bruno