Hi,
At Sun, 8 Apr 2001 23:04:29 +0200 (CEST),
PILCH Hartmut <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> My impression is that this subject is not urgent for this round.
> Currently our problem is not having enough unifonts, no matter with which
> cjk national bias.
We don't have enough even local fonts. For Japanese, I know some
people are working on this field. We don't have Japanese fonts
with bold, italic, and so on. And more, we don't have Japanese fonts
for good number of sizes. We also don't have scalable font.
(Thus most of commercial Linux distributions such as RedHat and
Turbolinux include proprietary TrueType fonts. The most popular
usage of such TrueType fonts is Mozilla.)
Once good Japanese free fonts will be developed, it is easy to convert
it into Unicode encoding. I imagine it would be nice if all XFree86
fixed fonts have corresponding doublewidth fonts and all XFree86
proportional fonts include Ideogram.
I don't know about Chinese and Korean font projects.
I don't think having a good number of fonts is more important than
Variants distinguishing mechanism. You once wrote that you suffer
from typeface mismatching of CJK fonts. However, typeface is
at most beautiful-or-ugly problem. On the other hands, CJK Variants
is correct-or-wrong problem. And more, foreigners may misunderstand
wrong Variants are correct (this is harmful), while they can easily
notice ugly mismatching of typeface (this is harmless). If this
problem is not solved, I regard Unicode is not appropreate for CJK
multilingual text. (Well, I don't have urgent need for CJK
multilingual text. Since language tag support is not needed for
localization purpose [like Japanese version of Windows], it may be
true that Variants distinction is not very urgent, just like common
CJK typeface, because common CJK typeface is not needed for
localization purpose.)
> There are still some urgent problems left to solve before LANG=ja_JP.utf-8
> or LANG=fr_FR.utf-8 can become an acceptable default for the normal user.
> The language tag problem is not one of them, but it seems to have been
> largely solved already anyway.
Sure, IMO, character width problem and accompanying conversion table
problems are one of most urgent problems if Japanese people think of
using Unicode for serious daily business, not for Geek's hobby. In
"legacy" CJK encodings, width of each character is very clear.
ISO 646 characters and JIS X 0201 Kana are normalwidth while others
(JIS X 0208, JIS X 0212, JIS X 0213, KS X 1001, KS X 1002, GB 2312,
multibyte part of Big5, CNS 11643, and so on) are doublewidth.
(I don't know about GB18030's de-facto standard of character width.)
However, conversion tables between Unicode and CES's which contain
these CCS's are the cause of problem. This problem is very difficult
because it is partly a political problem. Since Microsoft and other
major vendors use Unicode widely (for internal encoding), they never
agree to modify conversion table, in order to keep consistency of
their old and new products. I have entirely no idea how this problem
can be solved. I am afraid that Microsoft's conversion table will
be the de-facto standard in Japan and I imagine it is likely.
I don't know what problems French people need to fix to use Unicode.
> Unicode is already becoming popular in the CJK world.
Since I live in Japan, use Windows, write and read Japanese text,
and exchange text data with Japanese people everyday, then I will
easily notice if Unicode will become popular in, at least, Japan.
However, I have never received Unicode text file nor I have never
read Unicode web page (except for experimental purpose of Unicode
itself). Internal usage? I don't care, as a user.
> Which is due to other difficulties that currently exist with using
> the ja_JP.utf-8 locale. A general lack of support, including in XIM
> and XIM applications.
Our urgent need is usage of XIM under legacy locales. And more,
for example, XTerm-152-27 can use XIM under both legacy and UTF-8
locales.
---
Tomohiro KUBOTA <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
http://surfchem0.riken.go.jp/~kubota/
"Introduction to I18N"
http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/intro-i18n/
-
Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels
Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/lists/
