On Wednesday 23 March 2005 04:16, Jan Willem Stumpel wrote: > > In my Mozilla browser, both of these "é" glyphs appear as the > > Chinese style, [..] Maybe you should use PNG graphics here in > > addition to your Unicode text so everyone can see what the > > (trivial) difference is. > > Did that.
Ok, I think I need to explain this a bit. 1. The font used in the Unicode PDF files has been made by a chinese font supplier and the glyphs follow the GBK (GB18030) standard used in Mainland China. That's why they look like the (simplified) Chinese glyphs (they *are* simplified Chinese glyphs). 2. The difference in the 'bone' character (radical) is not the only one and the whole thing is more complicated than it looks like. Traditionally the characters have been written all the same way in all CJK areas (China, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Vietnam). The "correct" way to write these characters is *not* reflected by the Unicode standard, nor by the Arphic fonts. In Taiwan, scholars and the MOE (Ministry of Education) push to write those characters the "correct" traditional way. The "correct" and traditional way of the most important and controverse characters: a) "Rain" é: The 'raindrops' in this character should not face all downwards, but as follows: upper left one faces from left-up to right-down, lower left one faces from left-down to right-up, upper right one faces from right-up to left-down, lower right one faces from left-up to right-down. Reason: the drops represent "Water", which is written that way. b) "Flesh" radical, looks similar like "Moon" æ, but the two horizontal strokes in the middle are actually slanted, the upper one from left-up to right-down, the lower one from left-down to right-up. This is to distinguish "flesh" from "moon". c) "Bone" radical: upper part faces to the right, lower part is the "flesh" radical and should have the middle strokes slanted, like explained in b). During the cultural revolution in the 1970's in Mainland China, they "simplified" many characters. The result is what we see in the Unicode standard: a) the "rain' drops are all facing to the same direction, b) the "flesh" radical looks like "moon" and c) the "bone" upper part faces to the left (one stroke less) and the lower part has become the "simplified" "flesh" which looks like "moon". Those simplified versions are considered "wrong" in Taiwan. Japan however has changed its attitude towards this issue: 1. they "simplified" traditional characters by themselves, but not as strong as China did. 2. Nowadays, they prefer the characters which have not been simplified by themselves before (e.g. "bone") to be written like China does. But not all fonts reflect those attitudes. Fonts develped in Mainland China *have to follow the GB1830 standard*, so there is no other option. Fonts developed in Japan and Taiwan can choose what they want, usually it's the traditional form or a slightly simplified variant. Arphic (Taiwan) uses a slightly simplified variant of traditional Chinese for its Big5 fonts. I have started a project to provide free Unicode CJK fonts, based on the Arphic fonts, which contain all commonly used CJK characters. I am following the Arphic style used in the Big5 fonts. However, I'm experimenting with OTF features, like providing multiple varients for different regions. The next release (scheduled for March 27.) will contain the varients for the "bone" character. Currently I know only OpenOffice.org to support this function. I only do this for testing first. Homepage of the project: http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software_2fCJKUnifonts Cheers Arne -- Arne GÃtje (éçè) <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> PGP/GnuPG key: 1024D/685D1E8C Fingerprint: 2056 F6B7 DEA8 B478 311F 1C34 6E9F D06E 685D 1E8C Key available at wwwkeys.pgp.net. Encrypted e-mail preferred.
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