Hi, I need to make a decision, and want to at least inform people of it, and get some feed-back.
The question is whether to remove the Japanese Hiragana/Katakana ranges or not. There are other options as well, but right now, I'm leaning toward removal. The problem is, these ranges sit in FreeFont without the Kanji characters. Without Kanji, very little Japanese can actually be written (that is my understanding). I have made a policy, that only *useful* ranges of glyphs should be present in FreeFont. If the existing characters aren't useful for presenting Japanese, what are they useful for? (What would be the use, say, of having only half the Latin alphabet?) Moreeover, there has been a complaint, that the existence of these ranges in FreeFont causes a problem. On some systems, FreeFont will be selected to display a Katakana character, but since FreeFont doesn't contain Kanji, a different font will be chosen to display a following Kanji character. The result can be quite ugly. The SuSE distribution actually contains a script that explicitly deletes the Japanese ranges from FreeFont, just for this reason. Of course, another option would be to acquire a full Japanese set, and copy that in. However, when I looked into several existing free ranges, I found they didn't pass FontForge's validation, or the many other tests I have been working so hard to make FreeFont pass. To make them do so would be an unacceptable amount of work for me. To copy them in as-is would be to negate the advantages of having such tests. At this point, I think the best thing would be for FreeFont to drop support for Japanese, leaving that for the several other excellent free Japanese fonts that are available. Cheers!
