> > This is not undisputed. Quotes of Chinese text in an otherwise
> > Japanese text are often, I'm told, all set in a Japanese font.
>
> There are about 120,000,000 Japanese people. It is natural a few of
> them have a bad habit to do so. At least, such a habit is never allowed
> for textbook on Chinese language for Japanese students.
It is quite well possible to typeset a Japanese textbook for the Chinese
language with a single Unicode font and no language tags. Some typography
perfectionists will be unhappy if you do that, but everybody will be able
to read everything correctly without difficulty. All the visually
distinctive glyph variations are available in Unicode. If you need more
"perfect" typography in the sense of current-day Japanese habits, you can
use systems like TeX or HTML that support language tagging and/or font
selection.
As a sidenote, I find it very strange that some Japanese people insist so
much on this "perfection" of typography. Most of what they treat as the
holy grail of their culture is really based on dubious reforms conducted
by a few Monbusho (Education Ministery) bureaucrats and Maoists in the 50s
and 60s, in a time where thinking was oriented toward paper. The
ideological fervor attached to these incidental details looks to me like
an ideological fervor that goes against East-Asian languages and cultures.
They are not protecting their culture but only the privileges derived from
a specialist knowledge that is becoming less important.
> Or, do you think it is natural that Unicode cannot be used for such
> purposes?
I do think that it is natural that the problems of typesetting
Japanese/Chinese mixed textbooks in a perfectionist way cannot be solved
at the text terminal level.
-phm
-
Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels
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