Keith Packard wrote:
> > Can't you use coverage to determine this?
> Not easily. Traditional Chinese, simplified Chinese, Japanese and Korean
> fonts cover the same Unicode regions, and fonts for all of these languages
> generally cover only a fraction of the total space making any coverage
> based language tag only a guess at best. In particular, we'd need to call
> upon an expert in the area of the two Chinese variants to get an idea if
> there were any codepoints distinguishing the two.
A little bit background of Chinese characters (Hanzi): Most of the
characters are not simplified, that is why the so called traditional
Chinese SET and simplified Chinese SET have lots of characters in common.
In Unicode, all three forms of Chinese characters are there: unchanged,
traditional, simplified and they occupy different code point. It is not
very difficult to distinguish the two SETs.
Since I am a fun of Chinese fonts, I have a large collection. All those
Chinese fonts (PCF and TTF) I've seen can be categorized as:
1. Covers only GB2312-1980: unchanged + simplified Chinese;
2. Covers only GB12345-1990: unchanged + traditional Chinese;
3. Covers only BIG5: unchanged + traditional Chinese;
4. Covers Unicode CJK Unified Ideographs: unchanged + traditional + simplified
Chinese;
5. Covers Unicode CJK Unified Ideographs and its extension A.
You don't need to worry about #2 because the fonts in that category
always don't have Unicode cmap and Xft can not deal with it anyway.
>From your coverage map, it is easy to tell which category the font is in.
But in my opinion, combining different Chinese fonts together to get
a bigger coverage is generally not a good idea. I see this kind of thing
happens in Mozilla, GTK+ 2. When I see it, the only effect is that it tells
me I should change my font settings, the same as I see undisplayable, square
substitute showing on my screen. So why go through all the trouble to
implement something no one will like.
<OffTopic>
Steve Underwood wrote:
> The growing popularity of traditional Chinese in the PRC (yes, its
> making a comeback), and a more relaxed political environment, probably
> means more combined fonts will appear, and could become the norm.
Traditional Chinese characters are always used in mainland China in whatever
kind of political environment. The rule is if your audience is general
public, use unchanged + simplified characters only; if your audience is
classics researcher, use unchanged + traditional characters.
Unchanged + simplified characters are recommended for any other purpose,
but no one will care if you don't. I think all the countries have similar
policy. Is that true that we should try to get our spelling right when using
English here?
</OffTopic>
Regards,
Yao Zhang
_______________________________________________
Fonts mailing list
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/fonts
