Breezy installer resolution

[Alvin Thompson]

On Wed, 2005-09-14 at 01:21 -0700, Matt Zimmerman wrote:
> This issue has nothing to do with the font.

i'm thinking of an alternative solution. if you can change fonts after
the kernel has loaded, why not create a custom font with just the
characters necessary to display the names of all the languages? for
'english', you would just need 7 characters: e-n-g-l-i-s-h. you would
only need 4 additional characters for 'français', since the 'i', 'n' and
's' is already added for english and the 'a' is repeated. you get the
idea.

use this font on the language selection screen only, then switch to the
appropriate font once the user selects their language. this way you
could avoid using a graphics mode entirely during the install, and
things would overall be a bit simpler.

i'm pretty sure there are currently fewer unique characters in all of
the different language names supported then there are characters
available in a font (minus line drawing and control characters). even if
the number of supported languages grows to the point where there are
more unique characters than there are code points, you can still use
this approach by using "previous"/"next" buttons instead of a scrollbar;
when switching pages you select the custom font appropriate for
displaying the languages on that page.

-alvin


-- 
Alvin Thompson

Navy: 42
Army: 13