Around 15 o'clock on Jul 7, Andrew C Aitchison wrote:

> > And of course, many fonts from China now cover most characters defined
> > in GB18030, which means if using coverage tables, these fonts will
> > appear to support both zh-CN and zh-TW...
> 
> Why "appear to" ?

The problem is that any zh-CN font with full GB18030 coverage will include
all of the codepoints covered by Big5.  That means if we test language
support strictly by coverage, a font encoding all of GB18030 will nominally
support zh-TW.  However, it's glyphs will be in simplified form which 
won't match the form expected by a zh-TW locale.

>From my recent conversations with native Chinese speakers, it appears that 
this is not ideal, but far less objectionable than using a Chinese font 
for Japanese.

Because the font does completely cover the expected encoding, it will at 
least avoid the problem of ransom-note typography where glyphs from
several incomplete fonts are mixed together on the screen.

Hmm.  A GB18030 font would still be better than a GB2312 font for zh-TW; 
perhaps we should stick with coverage, ignore the OS/2 codePageRange bits 
and let user preferences rule by placing traditional chinese fonts ahead 
of GB18030 fonts in the default configuration.

Keith Packard        XFree86 Core Team        HP Cambridge Research Lab


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