Text rendering of Unicode text in LC

[Peter Bogdanoff]

Hi Richmond, thanks for your reply. I realize this is for most an obscure corner of the world.

> 
> I don't know HOW you are getting the Chinese characters to show up, and as your sample
> does not contain selectable text I cannot "go backwards for Christmas" and work out
> what the Unicode addresses of some of those glyphs are.

This is a screen shot from virtual Windows 10 on my Mac in LC 9.0. On the Mac, of course, it’s beautiful. The exact same HTML displayed in LC 8 versions in Windows don’t show this particular problem of a visual mix of styles (there’s other problems). It’s a very large project, but I’ll prepare a small stack example.


> My own experience with Unicode in LiveCode has been confined to Indic, Slavic and Old English
> alphabetic forms and I have always ended up with "proper" anti-aliased true type representation.

I want to assume that “proper" display would happen here. LC 8 rendering is uniformly bad, not un-evenly bad as LC 9. The Chinese editor tells me that each character is too close to the next—it looks squished together. Words are made up of 1-3 characters and they need space around them. She describes the “bold” looking characters in LC 9 as looking like a display font, not for body text.
> 
> ---
> 
> At the risk of being seen as extremely goofy . . .
> 
> Are ALL your Chinese characters contained in a single font?

Yes, I went back reselected text and set the fonts to make sure. I studied the HTML to look for anomalies, but all appears normal.
> 
> [Even though that is claimed on the page]
> 
> ------
> 
> Certainly IFF all your Chinese characters are contained in a single font and are
> NOT differently weighted (i.e. some are not BOLD while others are not)
> I don't think LiveCode should be at fault.

Yes, that’s why I’m asking about the Skia rendering. Anyone at Livecode to help with this?????
> 
> What makes things a bit awkward is how your text images online are generated . . .
> 
> If you were to export a PNG or JPEG image from your textField inwith your LiveCode stack
> you would get an EXACT representation of what the field looked like.
> 
> My experience of exporting a field as HTMLtext has also always been positive as long
> as the font of the resultant HTML page is a webfont derived from the font used inwith LiveCode.

I saved the HTML to a file, opened it in Firefox in Windows and it is great, as it should be. The same HTML displayed in LC is subpar.
> 
> --------
> I won't pretend to understand what you say about Skia.
> 
> But I do wonder why there has to be anything between LiveCode and your web representation.
> 
> -----
> I, also, don't understand the necessity for Adobe Spark.
> 
> But I'm one of those people who like to keep things simple.

Spark was a free, quick solution to get the images up.
> 
> This: http://andregarzia.on-rev.com/richmond/dwriterpro.html
> 
> contains NOTHING more than simple images rendered out of a LiveCode stack as screenshots from a textField.
> 
> Richmond.
> 
> On 13/8/2018 10:02 pm, Peter Bogdanoff via use-livecode wrote:
>> To follow up with my question from yesterday…and to continue with Biblical allusions others have begun…
>> 
>> I’ve descended into <font> hell, which I’m trying get out with some light from LiveCode Mark!
>> 
>> To recap, the rendering of Chinese characters in Windows 10 is willy-nilly through different versions of LC. Earlier versions display bitmap glyphs, later versions display drawn characters. Now in LC 9.0 it displays a MIX of apparent bold and plain of characters all set identically.
>> 
>> Examples:
>> https://spark.adobe.com/page/clCst4mdUu8Jy/ <https://spark.adobe.com/page/clCst4mdUu8Jy/>
>> 
>> What’s going on here? Bugs?
>> 
>> My personal situation—this is a multi-year project that includes one of the two largest academic book publishers in China who are looking to our project as the vanguard of digital publishing in their country. They are looking at this text display and saying, “we can’t publish this.” Now, they want to show it at a publishing conference...
>> 
>> The Chinese translators say the bitmap text is great, but the anti-aliased rendered text is unusable. And everyone there has Windows. We with roman-text eyes don’t necessarily see a problem; they with Chinese character eyes are very particular.
>> 
>> I’m supposing this is Skia doing the work (with the harfbuzz text shaping library?)?? If true, I see from the Skin/harfbuzz documentation on Font Embedded Bitmaps:
>> 
>> "bool isEmbeddedBitmapText() const
>> Returns true if Font Engine may return Glyphs from font bitmaps instead of from outlines.”
>> 
>> https://skia.org/user/api/SkPaint_Reference#Subpixel_Text
>> 
>> 
>> Can there be a font property option to display just the bitmap? Or are there other fixes that can be made?
>> 
>> Peter Bogdanoff
>> ArtsInteractive
>> 
>>> On Aug 12, 2018, at 4:15 PM, Peter Bogdanoff via use-livecode <use-livecode at lists.runrev.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Songti SC Regular
>> _______________________________________________
>> use-livecode mailing list
>> use-livecode at lists.runrev.com
>> Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences:
>> http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-livecode
> 
> _______________________________________________
> use-livecode mailing list
> use-livecode at lists.runrev.com
> Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences:
> http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-livecode