Re: Drawing all characters using GD

Ah, thanks, I didn't notice a i18n mailing list. I'll try there. Maybe if I had a list of font files, I could test each to work with a given string, until I find one which works? ~Seth On May 4, 2007, at 2:54 PM, Richard Lynch wrote:

On Fri, May 4, 2007 9:23 am, Seth Price wrote:

I have enough fonts installed on my machine to draw most of the world's UTF-8 characters. But they aren't all in one font file. How can I use the resources I have to reliably draw any character using imagetttext()? For example: Most of the text I want to draw is regular ASCII, many words contain Extended ASCII. Then some of it is Korean, Chinese, Japanese or Arabic. I don't know when I'll come across what charset. I want to draw them all. Is this even possible?

I don't think there is any one giant charset you could have that would slap all the languages together... The whole point of a charset is to set up correspondences between numbers and the "letter" you see. So every different charset is just a mapping from a number to a "glpyh" (the physical representation of the letter, like a series of pen-strokes, as I understand it) And presumably the guys making up UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32 didn't make these numbers up just for fun, and actually have languages that NEED 32 bits to represent every "letter". I suppose, in theory, you could take every charset, and create a UTF-40 which used 40 bits, and use the first byte (8 bits) for an "offset" and then you could map your super-charset back to normal charsets, assuming there are no more than 255 languages to support. I guess if there's more than 255 languages, you're looking at even more bits/bytes... Sounds like a lot of work, though... Maybe ask over on the i18n PHP mailing list, as they're way more familiar with this stuff than most users here. --Some people have a "gift" link here. Know what I want? I want you to buy a CD from some indie artist. http://cdbaby.com/browse/from/lynch Yeah, I get a buck. So?