On Fri, 28 Jun 2002, Keith Packard wrote:
>
> Around 0 o'clock on Jun 29, Yao Zhang wrote:
>
> > A GB18030 font (covers CJK Unified Ideographs and its extension A in Unicode
> > terms) should really be labeled as
> > Simplified Chinese AND Traditional Chinese
> > while fonts with GB2312 coverage should be labeled as
> > Simplified Chinese
> > and BIG5 coverage should be labeled as
> > Traditional Chinese
>
> I'm confused by this; my exposure to Chinese fonts says that simplified
> Chinese and traditional Chinese have significant overlap in Unicode
> codepoints, but that the glyphs are quite a bit different in appearance.
I doubt this is the case. As far as I can tell
from ISO 10646 (unlike Unicode, for a single Han character, ISO
10646 lists glyphs as _commonly_ used in PRC, Taiwan, Japan, ROK, and
Vietnam. ISO 10646:2 also lists DPRK glyphs), characters common in
GB2312(SC) and Big5(TC) do not have big enough difference (if there's
any difference at all) in glyphs to make using a _single_ font(say,
GB18030/GBK fonts) for both zh_CN and zh_TW undesirable. IMHO, most
problems with Han Unification arise not from using a _single_ font
targeted at one of zh_TW/zh_CN/ja/ko to render a run of text in another
but from mixing _multiple_ fonts (with _drastically different_ design
principle and other differences like baseline) to render a single run
of text (say, 65% of characters drawn from one font, 25% from a second
font, 7% from a third font, etc). I'm not saying there's no problem at
all using a TC font for Japanese text rendering. I'm well aware that
many Japanese don't like that. However, using GBK/GB18030 fonts for TC
should present much much less problem than that.
> I'm not interested in discovering which fonts can display a particular
> document; that's easily done with Unicode coverage. What I'm interested in
> is selecting the font best suited for presenting data tagged for a
> particular language.
I believe Yao's well aware of your interest here. What he meant is
that using GBK/GB18030 fonts for both SC and TC rendering is all right. It
could be even desirable in some cases. 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). Even though font selection
routine does a pretty good job of picking two fonts(Big5 font and
GB2312/GBK/GB18030) with similar look and feel, there may be a subtle
but noticable difference between two. If GBK/GB18030 font is used to
render _all_ Han characters in the doc., this wouldn't be an issue and
the result would give a uniform and consistent look and feel.
> Tagging GB18030 fonts as suitable for traditional chinese seems like a
> mistake; the glyph forms are more likely simplified, and it would be
> preferable to use a traditional chinese font, if any is available. Of
I'm not sure what you meant by 'glyph forms are more likely
simplified'. You might have misunderstood some aspects of Han Unification
in Unicode/10646. In Unicode, simplified forms of Chinese characters are
NOT unified with corresponding traditional forms of Chinese characters.
If GB2312 and Big5 have some characters in common, that's because PRC
didn't simplify them and just decided to use traditional forms.
Jungshik Shin
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