Hello, Stefan, I'll try to answer from a Japanese viewpoint.
On Fri, 14 Jun 2013 15:07:18 +0200 Stefan Knorr <[email protected]> wrote: > #1 I saw that e.g. Microsoft uses different default fonts for > Chinese/simplified, Chinese/traditional, Japanese & Korean text. > I don't quite understand this, as there are many fonts which seem > to cover the whole spectrum of CJK characters (like WenQuanYi Micro > Hei [1], which I am currently using). Why? Are there common > characters (i.e. Chinese traditonal characters) that are written > differently between countries? > (Or, in other words, is it appropriate to confront Japanese, > Korean or RoC users with fonts designed for mainland China?) These are two common considerations. One, is a problem of a culture and history. Chinese and Japanese uses many Kanji characters for expressing sentences, but the meaning of each characters are sometimes different. Unicode defines these some characters as the same codepoint (although these characters should be dealed as the different). In addition to that, Simplified Chinese (commonly used in mainland China) uses simplified style of Kanji characters; Japanese and Traditional Chinese (commonly used in Taiwan) does not use (and often cannot be read). But these have the same codepoint (for the same meanings). Another one is a problem is a appearance. Chinese and Japanese prefer different gryphs. When Chinese (Japanese) fonts are used in Japanese (Chinese) text, its texts are hard to read in Japanese (Chinese) users. So that, the different fonts should be used in Chinese and Japanese. (Korean uses Hangul characters (not Kanji) mostly, this problem will not be occur.) Thanks, -- Yasuhiko Kamata E-mail: [email protected] -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] To contact the owner, e-mail: [email protected]
