Kaixo! On Sat, Jun 29, 2002 at 09:34:43AM -0700, Keith Packard wrote: > This goal is reflected in the design I outlined -- fonts are deemed > "suitable" for a particular language when they cover a significant > fraction of the codepoints commonly associated with that language.
That is inacceptable. A font is suited for a given language when it covers *ALL* of the codepoints needed for that language. The only exception in checking *all* of the needed codepoints is that of CJK languages, that is because: - there is a very small set of such languages - the fonts are designed with coverage of one of them in mind - the mandatory glyphs needed for a given CJK language that don't overlap with any other CJK language make a quit big set, allowing to test just a carefully chose and small set of glyphs, and assume that all other glyphs needed for a given CJK language are present too. Maybe also scripts used for one and only one language can be handled withotu the need to check all the needed codepoints (but on the other hand they always form a small amount of codepoints, so checking them all is not a problem) But for the big majority of languages, that are not the only ones written with a given script, just checking coverage of a "signifiant fraction" is not enough. For example Spanish, it needs the a-z letters plus áéíóúüñ (that is, aacute, eacute, iacute, oacute, uacute, udiaeresis and ntilde). If only one of these is missing then you cannot render a Spanish text correctly, even if out of the 66 chars (33 lowercase, 33 upercase) the font covers 65 of them, it is still not suitable to properly render Spanish text (it may get unnoticed if the text just happens to don't use the missing letter, but relying in chance is not very serious) So, the tests for CJK languages and for other languages are clearly different, only CJK languages can go with testing only a "signifiant fraction", for all other languages all chars must be tested. > > Suppose there's a document tagged as zh_TW that explains how PRC government > > simplified Chinese characters to boost the literacy rate after WW II. If a > > Big5 font (that doesn't cover all characters in the doc) is selected > > instead of a GBK/GB18030 font (with the full coverage), simplified Han > > characters(not used in Taiwan but only used in PRC) in the doc have to be > > rendered with another font (most likely GB2312/GBK/GB18030 font). > > A correct version of this document would tag individual sections of the > document with appropriate tags. This way, the zh_TW sections could be > presented in a traditional Chinese font while the mainland portions are > displayed with simplified Chinese glyphs. Indeed. I wonder however how place names are handled. Are there place names with names using hanzi that don't exist in simplified form ? If so, what would be the preferred solution to write such a place name in a simplified Chinese text ? Same question for people names. -- Ki ça vos våye bén, Pablo Saratxaga http://chanae.stben.be/pablo/ PGP Key available, key ID: 0xD9B85466 [you can write me in Walloon, Spanish, French, English, Italian or Portuguese] _______________________________________________ Fonts mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/fonts
