Edward Lee wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 08, 2002, Jungshik Shin wrote:
> > On Mon, 8 Jul 2002, Edward Lee wrote:
> >
> > > There are `two' Traditional Chinese fonts here. In zh-tw the
> > > radical/stroke of some glyphs are differrent with the TC glyphs
> > > in GB18030 fonts.
> >
> > Could you give Unicode code points of a few of those characters?
> > Have you checked them out at your own government's Han character variant
> > dictionary at http://140.111.1.40?
>
> Yes, I know the site.
>
> The examples are U+89D2(Big5 0xa8a4), U+904E(Big5 0xb94c),
> U+9AA8(Big5 0xb0a9), U+5433(Big5 0xa764),
Yes, you are right. There are differences in how a Chinese character
is written. The examples you mentioned above are well documented in
almost all the Chinese dictionaries published in mainland China. There
is always a "Cross Reference Table for New and Old Glyph Forms" in
those dictionaries.
What happened was: Because there were so many small variants in
Chinese character forms over the thousands of years, there was an
effort going on to standardize those forms at least in printing. For
one reason or another, a particular form was picked which resulted
the differences we see today.
Now, back to a Unicode font which covers CJK Unified Ideographs and
Extension A. One such example is SimSun18030.ttc. Its OS/2 table
indicates it is intended for traditional Chinese. Is it correct?
Of cause, yes! Because traditional Chinese is also used in mainland
China and SimSun18030.ttc provides those traditional characters in a
form some of which may not be used to people in HK and TW.
Now another font covering CJK Unified Ideographs and its Extension A,
MING_UNI.TTF. Its OS/2 table also indicates it is intended for both
simplified and traditional Chinese. But those glyph forms are in the
form people in HK and TW are used to.
These two fonts have similar coverage for Chinese characters (except
MING_UNI.TTF has some unique Cantonese characters in PUA). So from
coverage one can not tell if it is for zh_CN or zh_HK/zh_TW. Their
OS/2 table correctly states that both are supporting simplified and
traditional Chinese. So from OS/2 table one still can not tell if
a font is intended for zh_CN or zh_HK/zh_TW.
I know most people think
zh_CN = simplefied Chinese
and
zh_TW = tranditional Chinese
It is only mostly true but not exactly true. Especially for fonts
covering CJK Unified Ideographs and its Extension A, it is wrong.
With the rapid adoption of Unicode, we are going to see more fonts
from different regions covering CJK Unified Ideographs and its Extension A.
The only way to find out which Han variant one font has is by looking at
it. Coverage doesn't help us here and OS/2 table won't too. As long
as we can configure it properly, zh_CN, zh_HK and zh_TW etc really do not
matter.
Regards,
Yao Zhang
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