> Although DynaLab was the font foundry commissioned by the MOE to
> create the new standard character shapes to be used in Taiwan,
> Arphic also sells a font of standard character shapes the MOE would
> approve of. I bought my copy in Taiwan in Jan 2001.
Interesting. Which one?
I'm only aware of the MingTiEG-Medium font which covers the whole CNS
range (about 55000 characters)? I got a copy from Arphic (a whopping
42MByte CID font), but this font isn't for sale, AFAIK.
> Standardization of the written Chinese language on the mainland
> began soon after the establishment of the People's Republic in 1949.
> It was guided by three principles: [...]
Thanks for your explanations. While I know that most of the glyph
shapes have been used earlier (since they derive from the grass
script), I often have the feeling that the Japanese had better taste
while simplifying characters -- at least for printing. It simply
looks bad if you write å within a square; it visibly distorts the
grayness of a page.
> However, these simplified versions are used all the time by people
> in Taiwan. For instance, when I was in in Taipei in Jan 2001, one
> of the largest cell phone companies, Taiwan Dageda, used the
> simplified character for "wan" in their logo.
Indeed. For both `tai' and `wan' the people use shorthands in daily
use, this is, å and æ instead of è and ç.
> > 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.
Most of the problems with font shapes stem from the early days of the
Big 5 encoding. As a member of the (now defunct) CCCII project told
me, the `standard comittee' of those five companies simply took the
Japanese bitmap glyph shapes from an early version of JIS X 0208 for
filling up many slots to save time, inspite of the fact that many
Japanese characters are traditionally drawn differently -- cf. the
famous problem of the radical
\ |
----- vs. -----
where the left form is used in Chinese and the right form in Japan.
AFAIK, the early ETen Big 5 bitmap fonts always used the Japanese
form.
Werner
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