Re: [I18n]ISO 10646 Fonts and XFontSet question
Hi, At Wed, 3 Oct 2001 16:58:36 +1000 (EST), Jim Breen [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: [David Starner (Re: [I18n]ISO 10646 Fonts and XFontSet question) writes:] Would it be possible to give a quick rundown on what the Monbushou rules are? Well, a quick overview. - from the 1890s there were rumbles in educational circles in Japan about the difficulty of learning so many kanji, and the desirability to reduce the working set to a reasonable number. There were also concerns about the spelling af the kana representation of the readings of kanji (snip) Thank you for your report. You know very well (well, bettern than I) about written or official rules. However, you don't know well on the real state of average Japanese people, which cannot be studied from literatures... The limited set of kanji has survived pretty well. Only a small percentage of Japanese know many kanji outside that list, and often they are just for names. Many (I think majority part of) Japanese people know Kanjis outside the rules of Monbushou. I think newspapers and so on limit the set of usable Kanjis to these about 2000 Kanjis because they should be read by everyone. Of course it is unlikely that every Japanese are perfect Kanji students. --- Tomohiro KUBOTA [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.debian.or.jp/~kubota/ Introduction to I18N http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/intro-i18n/ ___ I18n mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/i18n
Re: [I18n]ISO 10646 Fonts and XFontSet question
Kaixo! On Tue, Oct 02, 2001 at 02:15:36PM +0900, Tomohiro KUBOTA wrote: Thus, I think we need bi-width or variable-width fonts which covers You only need that for charcell fonts. I have already seen Japanese text My intention is mainly on variable-width fonts. So far XFree86 I mean for variable width fonts you don't need to worry about single width and double width variants of latin/greek/cyrillic/katakana scripts; that concept simply doesn't apply for variable width fonts. In short, I want an iso10646 substitution of a font named variable. Is that alias already in use ? I would prefer sans as the default variable width font. -- Ki ça vos våye bén, Pablo Saratxaga http://www.srtxg.easynet.be/PGP Key available, key ID: 0x8F0E4975 ___ I18n mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/i18n
Re: [I18n]ISO 10646 Fonts and XFontSet question
Hi, At Wed, 3 Oct 2001 10:37:17 +1000 (EST), Jim Breen [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Of course we can all (well, 99.9% of us 8-} ) whip out lists of common words that contain non-Jouyou kanji, some of which didn't even make Level 1. Donburi-no-don is another obvious one. I usually see kampeki written with the peki in kana for this reason. (Monbushou rules.) I know the Monbushou rules. For example, newspapers admit it. However, Average Japanese people can read it and daily publications such as novels usually use the Kanji. Since I am a native Japanese speaker who live in Japan, I know not only official rules but also the real state of Japanese language. Many people think the Monbushou rules is too strict not to use Kanji. One of the role of the mixture of Kanji and Hiragana is like a whitespace between words in English. Writing too many words in Hiragana or a part ofwor ds inHiraga na isconf usi ng like this. Of course I don't insist that there are no Japanese people who like the Monbushou rules. --- Tomohiro KUBOTA [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.debian.or.jp/~kubota/ Introduction to I18N http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/intro-i18n/ ___ I18n mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/i18n
Re: [I18n]ISO 10646 Fonts and XFontSet question
On Mon, 1 Oct 2001, Jim Breen wrote: [Keith Packard (Re: [I18n]ISO 10646 Fonts and XFontSet question) writes:] Han unification arguably makes these four character sets the most problematic. What this means is that font selection must be done by a Problematic, yes, but is must be addressed cleanly and effectively. Arguments over glyphs have bedevilled the acceptance of Unicode in the CJK countries, and you still hear people in Japan saying Unicode Please, drop 'K' here. You may even drop 'C'. Most Koreans, if not all, do NOT care. Unicode has been perceived as 'the way' to go not only for multilingual use but also for Korean alone in Korea. Jungshik Shin ___ I18n mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/i18n
Re: [I18n]ISO 10646 Fonts and XFontSet question
[David Starner (Re: [I18n]ISO 10646 Fonts and XFontSet question) writes:] Someone (Jim Breen?) pointed out the extreme level to which Microsoft embeds bitmaps in their scalable fonts for good display. I think it was Markus. Jim -- Jim Breen [[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/] Computer Science Software Engineering,Tel: +61 3 9905 3298 P.O Box 26, Monash University, Fax: +61 3 9905 5146 Clayton VIC 3800, Australia $B%8%`!%V%j!%s(B@$B%b%J%7%eBg3X(B ___ I18n mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/i18n
Re: [I18n]ISO 10646 Fonts and XFontSet question
On Sun, Sep 30, 2001 at 03:44:18PM +0100, Markus Kuhn wrote: Usually, users are prefectly able to pick the fonts manually that have the coverage and style they really need, and if a glyph is missing from that font, it will typically also not be readable for the user. Mixing fonts automatically can lead often to far more ugly results than had the application just stuck with a single font and used its default glyph for everything missing. What about U+2000-U+27BE? There's a lot characters in there that your average user would want to see correctly, but might not be in their fonts. The number forms, the arrows, some of the math symbols, the currency symbols, the superscripts and subscripts, the general punctuation, the enclosed alphanumerics, the miscellaneous symbols, and the dingbats could easily show up one by one in random English text, and be stuff that the user would want displayed. And most of them wouldn't suffer that much from coming from a different font. -- David Starner - [EMAIL PROTECTED] Pointless website: http://dvdeug.dhis.org I saw a daemon stare into my face, and an angel touch my breast; each one softly calls my name . . . the daemon scares me less. - Disciple, Stuart Davis ___ I18n mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/i18n
Re: [I18n]ISO 10646 Fonts and XFontSet question
[Pablo Saratxaga (Re: [I18n]ISO 10646 Fonts and XFontSet question) writes:] The problem is not the mixing of a lot of script the problem is that even with only two scripts you have big chances to lack a font; for example I know of *no* font having glyphs for both Japanese and French. [Click, click]. OK, I'm now looking at a line of text which has Japanese, French and German words. All the acutes, graves, umlauts, etc. are there. The line is in EUC-JP, and the Latin_with_diacritics characters have come from JIS X 0212. The .bdf font for JIS X 0212 is standard in RH7.1 and works out of the box in kterm. OK, I'm using two font files, but if I wrote entirely in discriticed letters and obscure kanji, I could meet Pablo's criterion. 8-)} Also, I'm seeing the bloated JIS ASCII, so my solution is rather artificial.. French studiants of Japanese are continuosly faced with that problem. Most of the French people I am interacting with about Japanese matters are using UTF-8. Sadly they mostly are using Windblows. Jim -- Jim Breen [[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/] Computer Science Software Engineering,Tel: +61 3 9905 3298 P.O Box 26, Monash University, Fax: +61 3 9905 5146 Clayton VIC 3800, Australia $B%8%`!%V%j!%s(B@$B%b%J%7%eBg3X(B ___ I18n mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/i18n
Re: [I18n]ISO 10646 Fonts and XFontSet question
G'day [Tomohiro KUBOTA (Re: [I18n]ISO 10646 Fonts and XFontSet question) writes:] At Mon, 1 Oct 2001 12:59:22 +1000 (EST), Jim Breen [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Arguments over glyphs have bedevilled the acceptance of Unicode in the CJK countries, and you still hear people in Japan saying Unicode characters look Chinese, despite JIS X 0221 carefully showing each ideograph in distinct national glyph styles. Such arguments is obsolete in Japan. Obsolete, yes. But one still hears it and reads it. I think nobody in Japan believes that usage of Unicode forces Japanese people to use Chinese glyph. I heard comments to that effect several times in the last 12 months. Not from up-to-date computer-literate people, but from linguistics people who had been influenced by the nonsense that had been said and written. There is at least one vituperative anti-Unicode book out that I glanced through (the name and author escape me.) For example, Japanese version of MS Windows has TrueType Unicode fonts with Japanese glyph and it displays Japanese text properly. Quite true, and although I twinge to say it, Bill's Road-to-Damascus conversion to Unicode and its subsequent embedding in NT and derivatives has guaranteed its success in what may have been a difficult battle. There are still the die-hards, and the BTRON people, but they are doomed, I hope. French people who learn Japanese using Unicode must be careful to choose Japanese glyph, especially in case when (s)he doesn't have a supervisor who can point out when wrong glyphs are used. Fortunately the CJK arena seems to be the only one where national glyph styles are so important. Imagine if we had to provide French-looking alphabetics, Yiddish-looking Hebrew, Korean-looking hanja, Saudi-looking Arabic, Uttar Pradesh-looking Devanagari, etc. etc. all in the one font file. Yoroshiku Jim -- Jim Breen [[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/] Computer Science Software Engineering,Tel: +61 3 9905 3298 P.O Box 26, Monash University, Fax: +61 3 9905 5146 Clayton VIC 3800, Australia $B%8%`!%V%j!%s(B@$B%b%J%7%eBg3X(B ___ I18n mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/i18n
Re: [I18n]ISO 10646 Fonts and XFontSet question
Hi, At Mon, 1 Oct 2001 15:00:23 +1000 (EST), Jim Breen [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I heard comments to that effect several times in the last 12 months. Not from up-to-date computer-literate people, but from linguistics people who had been influenced by the nonsense that had been said and written. I imagine the discussion is not that they are forced to use Chinese glyph but that they don't have way to distinguish Japanese and Chinese glyphs. This discussion is right and wrong. We have now language-tag but I don't know any products which implements language-tags. Anyway, not only Unicode but also JIS are obviously insufficient for serious literature purpose. However, I think XFree86 doesn't need to support such serious usage. Average Japanese people will be satisfied if Japanese text is written in Japanese glyphs. Non-negligble number of Japanese people can read or are studying Chinese and/or Korean and they need to read Chinese and Korean in Chinese and Korean glyphs. I think this level of support is adequate for XFree86. There are still the die-hards, and the BTRON people, but they are doomed, I hope. Sorry, they are not doomed. New versions of BTRON are released every a few years and they are sold well in reality, though I don't have. Fortunately the CJK arena seems to be the only one where national glyph styles are so important. Imagine if we had to provide French-looking alphabetics, Yiddish-looking Hebrew, Korean-looking hanja, Saudi-looking Arabic, Uttar Pradesh-looking Devanagari, etc. etc. all in the one font file. Software developers just have to try to meet the real demands. CJK glyph distinction is a reality. (Even this is an opinion from a specific viewpoint. Some think that they are different _character_ and Unicode unified different _characters_. This distinction of viewpoint comes from the distinction of viewpoint about what is glyph and character, which is ambiguous for CJK Han Ideogram.) On the other hand, your imagination is mere an imagination and against the reality. --- Tomohiro KUBOTA [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.debian.or.jp/~kubota/ Introduction to I18N http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/intro-i18n/ ___ I18n mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/i18n
Re: [I18n]ISO 10646 Fonts and XFontSet question
Keith Packard wrote: ... Now that's a good idea -- allow the application to hand additional fonts to Xft to fill-in the holes. Applications would then be in control of how those additional fonts were selected if they so chose. Would you like a per-font callback invoked when an attempt to access non-existant glyphs was made? Or should the application detect this case before presenting data to the library? The app should be able to present a list but my gut level feeling is a callback is needed. Regardless of the order in which character are encountered the list must always have the same fonts in the same order. Moz does this by have a place holder for each font regardless of whether a X font was actually needed (eg: loaded). Thus the mLoadedFonts list holds the font placeholders and only when needed is a font is actually loaded into the placeholder. Yes, of course. That would be automatically handled if Xft started caching FreeType faces. This is not a caching issue. The concern is that, if for example there are 27 fonts needed to display unicode then regardless of whether the 27 font is needed 1st or not, the font placeholders in the list are in the same order. Number 27 is always #27 in the list. Brian Stell ___ I18n mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/i18n
Re: [I18n]ISO 10646 Fonts and XFontSet question
Brian Stell wrote: Keith Packard wrote: ... Now that's a good idea -- allow the application to hand additional fonts to Xft to fill-in the holes. Applications would then be in control of how those additional fonts were selected if they so chose. Would you like a per-font callback invoked when an attempt to access non-existant glyphs was made? Or should the application detect this case before presenting data to the library? The app should be able to present a list but my gut level feeling is a callback is needed. Additionally: if the app did not define a callback then it would be nice if Xft could do something reasonable. -- Brian Stell ___ I18n mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/i18n
Re: [I18n]ISO 10646 Fonts and XFontSet question
Brian Stell wrote: Keith Packard wrote: ... Now that's a good idea -- allow the application to hand additional fonts to Xft to fill-in the holes. This is where/why the list of available glyphs in a font is needed. -- Brian Stell ___ I18n mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/i18n
Re: [I18n]ISO 10646 Fonts and XFontSet question
Around 9 o'clock on Sep 29, Brian Stell wrote: Xft is clearly the 1st choice (and perhaps only choice) most single language apps should look at to make this transition. As Xft can also use core fonts, and will provide a Unicode API for those, Xft should be useful even when running on legacy X servers. Of course, the fun TrueType features will all be missing, but at least apps won't have to deal with ISO2022... Once there is an efficient way to find out which glyphs are available, multilingual apps will need code to combine these fonts in to a multilingual font (Pango) and do complex text layout (Pango?, FTLayout?, ICU?). I'm considering whether font merging would be useful in Xft. Once I've finished adding the Unicode coverage information for each font, adding the ability to do font merging would be relatively easy. It might extend the coverage for simple applications, or it just might encourage people to ignore the harder layout issues which Xft will not address. What do other people think? Should Xft do simplistic merging? Obviously, there would be a way to disable this as well. [EMAIL PROTECTED]XFree86 Core Team SuSE, Inc. ___ I18n mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/i18n
Re: [I18n]ISO 10646 Fonts and XFontSet question
Markus Kuhn wrote: ... Is there already a way to use pixel fonts with render? For some applications (terminal emulators with small glyphs most notably, e.g. popular with programmers and sys-admins), bitmap fonts will always be preferable over TrueType fonts. Please do not neglect them in any future font architectures. Using hand tuned bitmap fonts is a very important consideration as they almost always look better than outline rendered bitmaps. Many people prefer them over anti-aliased fonts at the same size. This is why better TrueType fonts have hand tuned bitmaps *in* them. For example, MSGothic (with ~7500 glyphs) has embedded bitmaps for sizes 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, and 22. (I'll bet that took some time.) -- Brian Stell ___ I18n mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/i18n
Re: [I18n]ISO 10646 Fonts and XFontSet question
Pablo Saratxaga wrote: ... If it would also be possible for users (or sys admin) to have the choice to merge those default pseudo fonts with real fonts (of the same style), that is, all fonts will always have the maximum coverage, the face name will only say which real font to get the glyphs to, each time it is possible; then it would be the nearest to perfection for me. Mozilla supports this now. Earlier this year we added code to look for fonts with the same foundry/family (eg: adobe-helvetica) when making the list of fonts. I already see several Japanese system vendors making an alias-misc font where various JISX0201, JISX0208, JISX0212, and JISX0213 fonts are aliased to this common name. They are controlling this merged font. When I get to my system at work I will send a URL. Brian Stell ___ I18n mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/i18n
Re: [I18n]ISO 10646 Fonts and XFontSet question
Around 16 o'clock on Sep 29, Brian Stell wrote: My only word of caution here is that recently people have been generating bitmap fonts from outline fonts and installing them as bitmap fonts. These are at best only fair and often are mediorce. At present I do not know how to distinguish these automatically generated bitmaps from hand tuned bitmaps. Right now, I'd like to get support for bitmaps embedded in TrueType fonts which should avoid this particular issue. I don't think too many TrueType fonts embed untuned bitmaps. Outline generated bitmaps are not great. AA CJK fonts can be quite usable if not as nice as the hand tuned bitmaps. The outline CJK fonts I have seen are essentially worthless without AA; at normal sizes, they are impossible for my eyes to decipher. [EMAIL PROTECTED]XFree86 Core Team SuSE, Inc. ___ I18n mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/i18n
Re: [I18n]ISO 10646 Fonts and XFontSet question
Around 11 o'clock on Sep 29, Brian Stell wrote: Using hand tuned bitmap fonts is a very important consideration as they almost always look better than outline rendered bitmaps. Many people prefer them over anti-aliased fonts at the same size. I'll fix Xft to use them; I believe it currently avoids them. Certainly hand-tuned bitmaps are better for non-AA text. And, hand-tuned bitmaps are certainly easier to find than high-quality TrueType fonts, which are needed for decent AA text. For CJK, using bitmaps is even more important; the outlines generate illegible results at moderate sizes. [EMAIL PROTECTED]XFree86 Core Team SuSE, Inc. ___ I18n mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/i18n
Re: [I18n]ISO 10646 Fonts and XFontSet question
Around 23 o'clock on Sep 28, Juliusz Chroboczek wrote: We're aware of that (Tifinagh is the example I like to give). The point Keith was making (if I understood him correctly) was that core X fonts should only be used for glyphs covered by legacy encodings. For new glyphs, client-side fonts (Xft or otherwise) should be used instead. Juliusz is mostly correct; the problem is that any fonts encoded in iso10646-1 must be opened and queried before an application can discover which glyphs are available. It is the only common X encoding in use today that has this property. For any other encoding, fonts are expected to provide the complete repertoire of glyphs. If we use iso10646-1 encodings, we'll avoid this particular issue. XLFD has no standard mechanism for specifying which glyphs are available. As it was developed before Unicode, there was no concept that a font wouldn't encode every glyph. I believe that iso10646-1 encoded fonts can only be effectively used from the client side; a database can accompany the fonts themselves allowing applications to perform font selection based on available glyphs. I hope to finish work on Xft in the near future which demonstrates how this works. Any way of making iso10646-1 fonts work reasonably will require a change in the X server. As any such change takes essentially the same amount of time to propogate to all X servers, we might as well use the one which solves a host of other issues at the same time (Render). [EMAIL PROTECTED]XFree86 Core Team SuSE, Inc. ___ I18n mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/i18n
