Tomohiro KUBOTA wrote on 2001-04-03 02:33 UTC:
> Edward Cherlin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> > It has been asserted here several times that a font using variants
> > preferred by Japanese readers would be quite acceptable to Chinese,
> > Korean, and other readers. In that case, a common font is possible.
>
> Your opinion is that Japanese standard glyph should be the world
> common glyph and that Chinese and Korean should use them, is it?
> Japanese people will be happy with it. However, here is an example
> of native Chinese who will be unhappy with it.
> http://www.xfree86.org/pipermail/i18n/2000-November/000426.html
Just taking the Japanese glyphs is one possibility. There might even be
a nicer one tough.
Is the following scenario completely inconceivable?
A group of East Asian caligraphy experts with internationally recognised
good taste get together, look for every glyph in the unihan database at
the shapes used in all the different referenced dictionaries and then
draw for each character a glyph in a consistent style that is pleasing
for people accustomed to any single of these style variants. This might
mean that for some glyphs the Japanese variations have to be taken
stronger into account then a native Chinese reader would normally have
expected. Not quite as strong as to offend the Chinese or Korean eye,
but with enough of a hint towards the modern Japanese shape such that
comfortable readability for people trained within the Japanese ministry
of education guidelines is ensured.
Sounds like an interesting caligraphic challenge to me and a project
worthwhile to sponsor and support. The amount of work involved is
enormous of course, and I am not sure whether it is feasible to get
something like this together as a freeware project. Perhaps something
for which one should set up a little non-profit organization and write a
research grant proposal to various CJK ministries.
Since we now have thanks to the IRG a common harmonised character
repertoire for CJK, perhaps it is now also time that the ideographic
teaching experts from CJK countries sit together and think about
possible ways to harmonise their teaching guidelines. The result could
be a common unified glyph shape reference font for teachers and textbook
authors in all CJK countries.
There are many possibilities towards a neat long-term solution that does
not rely on switching between legacy font styles ...
Markus
--
Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>
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