This page will explain how the fonts are handled in STLL.

A font file resource (class FontFileResource_c) contains the information where to load a font from, when the application needs one. This can be either a file name including path or it can be a buffer containing an already loaded file.

Unicode contains many more codepoints than many font files can contain. It is also not really handy to create one huge file containing all you need. That is why some fonts split up the whole range of unicode codepoints into several files. You then choose which one you want to use and assemble them into a font within your application.

This concept is represented by the class FontResource_c. This class contains a list of font file resources.

This class is used to specify fonts for usage or for font loading within the application. You give this class to the font cache and it will load all the required font files.

What you then get is a font (class Font_c) containing all the fonts files from all the font file resources within the font resource.

Each font file resource will result in a FontFace_c class added to the Font_c. Each FontFace_c is one font file loaded for usage at a certain size.

For XHTML usage another layer of abstraction is added. This layer creates font families. A font family is a set of fonts, where each set has a different characteristic, e.g. normal, italic, bold font of one font.

You add one font resource class for each member of the family and the XHTML layouter will use them.

When drawing text using one font the application has to choose the right font face for each character to draw this is done by simply checking the font faces in the fonr one after the other. The first one that contains the required glyph is used. That means for you:

try to arrange the font files within the font resource so that the often used ones appear first
if 2 font faces provide the same characters put the one first into the resource that you want to use