I'm programming a custom bit of hardware (a media box) running a custom build of Linux (tangox 2.6.29.6-18-sigma #2 PREEMPT Tue Dec 20 14:00:43 UTC 2011 mips GNU/Linux) and need to find out what fonts are available on this system.
Globally, my task is to quiz a web service for some content and display it on the system (i.e. on the TV screen), but not all characters I receive from the "outside world" can be rendered via the font used by the media box. Fonts on the media box are outside of my control, as is the firmware - I have to get on with what I've got via the supported PHP API.
Question 1: How would I list all fonts available on the box, along with their supported character ranges? (We suspect that the font being used does not render some of the chars we need - so my issues can't be solved by just making sure everything is UTF8.)
I've tried:
xlsfonts (command not found)
/etc/X11/ (dir does not exist)
fc-list (command not found)
...none of the above helped.
I've located some fonts in:
ls -al /firmware/fonts
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 42643 Dec 31 1969 verdana-108-subset.aaf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 236340 Dec 31 1969 verdana-25.aaf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 426097 Dec 31 1969 verdana-34.aaf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 696763 Dec 31 1969 verdana-44.aaf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 834851 Dec 31 1969 verdana-48.aaf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1539 Dec 31 1969 webdings-30.aaf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 5517 Dec 31 1969 webdings-38.aaf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4509 Dec 31 1969 webdings-49.aaf
But I want to be sure that there are no other fonts hidden somewhere around the system and used by the firmware.
Question 2: Once I know the character range I can display in, is there a fool-proof way to strip out everything outside that range (I can do that), but simplify some of the fancy characters (e.g. accented e) into their English counter-parts? And last but not least - does anyone know of an existing PHP library that would do most of this for me?
P.S. Sorry if this question is a bit too n00bish - I'm not a Linux guru and don't have an intimate understanding of fonts/encodings.