On Mon, 2002-07-08 at 05:38, Keith Packard wrote:
> 
> 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.

Actually, if the font is a proper certified GB18030 font, then
simplified characters will have simplified glyphs, and traditional
characters traditional glyphs. (Han unification didn't unify simplified
and traditional characters, fortunately [or unfortunately])

I was thinking more on glyph designs and such; the Sung typeface used in
China doesn't exactly much the Ming typeface used in Taiwan, for
example.

> >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.

True.

> 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.

Actually, a proper GB18030 font would have a superset of Big5, HKSCS and
GB2312 characters.

-- 
  Roger So                 Debian Developer
  Sun Wah Linux Limited    i18n/L10n Project Leader
  Tel: +852 2250 0230      [EMAIL PROTECTED]
  Fax: +852 2259 9112      http://www.sw-linux.com/
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