On 4/11/07, Rich Felker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Indeed, glibc's character data is horribly outdated and incorrect. There are plenty of unsupported nonspacing characters, even characters that were present in Unicode 4.0. It also considers nonspacing letters to be non-alphabetic, which is a real problem for users of languages which utilize nonspacing letters.
AFAIK Pablo Saraxtaga has done something about it [1], though I didn't intend to dig deeper and check what has been done. [1] http://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=3885
The ambiguous characters are wide in CJK locales and narrow in others. This is probably annoying for some CJK users since the characters (such as Greek and Cyrillic) obviously should be narrow typographically; they're wide only for the sake of old programs and ascii-art type stuff which were designed for legacy charsets. IMO they should be made narrow by default in all locales with a modifier like "@wide" or something for the users who actually need them wide.
It really depends on the intended audience of the fonts. The original intention for those double width Greek and Cyrillic characters is to make them align nicely with all other CJK characters. Then there are no such thing as wide Greek/Cyrillic characters and wide version of some other symbols in Unicode, so font designers in Asia are forced to make them wide and map them to narrow ones, since they must support legacy encoding for commercial or whatever reason. They are doing this out of no choice (except discarding those glyphs, which would offend other users). I'm also bitten by this issue -- PUA codepoints always have wcwidth=1, and it would make CJK fonts suck again because characters keep overlapping against each other. Yes, PUA usage should be avoided whenever possible, but we would still see legacy systems in the short future. Not to mention some characters would never have the chance to enter Unicode. Abel
~Rich -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
-- Abel Cheung (GPG Key: 0xC67186FF) Key fingerprint: 671C C7AE EFB5 110C D6D1 41EE 4152 E1F1 C671 86FF -------------------------------------------------------------------- * GNOME Hong Kong - http://www.gnome.hk/ * Opensource Application Knowledge Assoc. - http://oaka.org/ * My own cave: http://me.abelcheung.org/ -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
