On Wed, 14 Aug 2002, Owen Taylor wrote:
> The current Korean orthography looks like a combination
> of KSC-5607.1987 with the complete Hangul Syllables
> area of Unicode.
I'm sorry to be 'pedantic'. Strictly speaking, this way of talking
about Korean orthography (in terms of precomposed syllables) is not quite
right. You have to say what consonants and vowels are allowed/required in
modern Korean orthography just like you talk about what alphabetic letters
are required of any given language represented with Latin/Greek/Cyrillic
alphabets.
> However, there are fonts out there that only have
> the Hangul syllables in KSC-5607.1987 ... one example
> would be the freely available 'Baekmuk Batang' font;
Not any more. A new set of Baekmuk fonts with
the full coverage of 11,172 precomposed modern syllables have been
available for quite a while (over two years?) although they may not
have been included in popular Linux distributions made outside Korea.
You can get them at
<ftp://ftp.mizi.com/pub/baekmuk/baekmuk-ttf-2.1.tar.gz>.
In addition to having the full set of 11,172 syllables (precomposed,
modern, complete), several glitches have been fixed.
> such fonts are *not* currently recognized as supporting
> Korean.
Nonetheless, you do have a point and I totally agree with you
on it.
> If this was just a matter of "preferring fonts with
> all the Hangul syllables in Unicode when all other things
> are equal", then this wouldn't be a big problem, but
This is a reasonable thing to do.
> it's more serious than this:
>
> - You can't specify such a font in a generic alias,
> and have it preferentially selected for Korean language
> tags.
>
> - You can't specify such a font in a generic alias,
> and have it selected at all if you have fonts
> with the complete orthography.
>
> - fontconfig statements like "disable hinting for
> Korean fonts" don't work properly with such a font.
These are certainly problematic.
> I think the right thing to do is probably just to use
> only the KSC-5607.1987 syllables in the Korean orthography;
> my understanding is that they are sufficient for the
> vast majority of modern Korean text.
I would omit 'vast'. :-).
Thanks to the dominance of MS-Windows in Korea as the leading
desktop platform, Koreans are not any more restricted to 2350
syllables. (in the past, they resort to JOHAB encoding to achieve the
same.) MS Windows supports CP949 (an extension of EUC-KR based on KS X
1001:1998) and ordinary Korean users have no way whether a syllable they
type in belongs to KS X 1001:1998 or not. The result is that more and
more documents (especially in web BBS', emails and on-line chatrooms where
'colloquial' - it'd better be called 'slang' of the net subculture often
times cryptic to people like me.) Korean with intentional/unconcious use
of non-orthography-compliant syllables is widely 'spoken'.) in Korean
include syllables outside KS X 1001:1998. (see
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=131388).
Even under Linux, there's no more restriction because ko_KR.UTF-8
locale can be used with Korean input method Ami
(with my patch to allow input of all 11,172 syllables:
http://jshin.net/faq/ami-1.0.11.utf8.patch.gz. It'd be nice if
distributions like RH and Mandrake pick up this patch so that Linux
users can be on par with MS Windows users.) Probably, the same is
true of MacOS X.
Jungshik
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