[FM Discuss] How to change the font for editing or translation

[Clytie Siddall]

On 04/04/2010, at 12:01 PM, Lachlan Musicman wrote:

> On Sun, Apr 4, 2010 at 12:13, Edward Cherlin <echerlin at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Sat, Apr 3, 2010 at 09:24, Clytie Siddall <clytie at riverland.net.au> wrote:
>>> I suppose we could also grab the original HTML and just use a source editor.
>> 
>> There is a Toggle HTML Source button on the toolbar, with an icon showing <>.

So far, that's the only backup option I've found: toggle the HTML code, copy it and paste it into an offline file. :S
> 
> But there's no font tags in the html - only heading tags - I am unsure
> of what would happen if you introduced one - I guess it depends on
> which fonts are installed on the server?

Currently, the only workaround for translators or users reading the manual on-server is enforcing the chosen browser font. (In a browser like Omniweb, you can set site-specific prefs: that would help a bit. Unfortunately, Omniweb doesn't display the editing toolbar in F.M.)

If we want to set preferred fonts in the manual itself, the individual HTML files are already affected by the CSS for the interface. The translated chapter files also don't have a header: would we have to specify a font for a <div> covering the whole doc.? That's a messy solution. :S

We could amend the FM CSS files to pick up preferred browser fonts, or even to query for preferred fonts by language. They don't need to exist on the server, only on the client machine. (I enforced Lucida Grande, an OSX font which you're unlikely to have on the FM server, and it displayed in the interface in Camino on my machine.)

Installing Dejavu on the server would be a good start for pan-Unicode font availability _without_ the user/translator having to enforce a preferred browser font. Please also see this list of preferred fonts by language:

http://wiki.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/Fonts

Note, at the bottom, the list of fonts.conf files available to fine-tune a system for language display:

http://wiki.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/Fonts/fonts.conf

from Clytie 

Vietnamese Free Software Translation Team