Hi Marguerite, thank you a lot for your effort!
On Sa, 2013-06-15 at 15:04 +0800, Marguerite Su wrote: > Hi, Stefan, > > On 06/14/2013 03:07 PM, Stefan Knorr 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?) > > 1. Most of Japanese/Korean chars are evolved from Traditional > Chinese(and there're still some left unchanged nowadays). eg: あ in > Japanese was 安 in Chinese. They looks quite different now, but あ was a > TC handwritten font a thousand year ago(They even had similar > pronounciations). > > 2. In 1950s, PRC released a national standard to simplify Traditional > Chinese in Mainland China. But RoC/HongKong/Macau didn't. After so > many years, Mainland Chinese can still read Traditional Chinese > (although they look weird to them), but Simplified Chinese are totally > new to those people who never received SC education. > > So yes, they're from the same origin, but common characters are > written differently now. > > UTF-8 do cover them all, but commerical OS didn't produce fonts > itself. Microsoft just buy fonts from different font companies. Ah. > > Font companies located in different countries have no motivation to > cover UTF-8. eg: if you want to sell a font in Mainland China, you > just need to cover about 20000 chars, but a UTF-8 font needs 1500000+ > fonts. Chinese is a script language, if you want to make a char, you > have to design it(costs money). Oh. I did not think about the economic reasons for this. > And there's still no open source project that have so much resources > to cover CJK. WQY solves the problem to some extent, but it just > combines strokes which may look ugly to non-SC users. As I know, > there's no Japanese contributors for that project. So it's making > Japanese/Korean font in a Chinese-oriented view. Hm, I thought, they imported their Japanese & Korean character sets from Droid Sans, too. Neither Hangeul, nor Hiragana/Katakana sets seem that large, in other words, the amount of characters of both is about on par with Latin – so it would be plausible to me that Google already prepared _complete_ fonts for them. At the same time, since you explain below that I should use a serif font for printing in everything but simplified Chinese, I will probably use a serif font for Japanese & Korean too. > Let me unify them for you. > > HeiTi is sans-serif, KeiTi is serif. > > Ming fonts are originated from Japanese Mincho font, a serif font. > > Actually, they're just different sayings: > > In RoC, they call sans-serif fonts "Zen Hei", serif fonts "Ming". > > In PRC, we call sans-serif fonts "Hei Ti", serif fonts "Kai Ti(Kei > Ti)" or "Song Ti". Awesome! That & the below clears things up /considerably/. > Chinese is a square-style font, you can write some strokes italic, but > if you write the whole char italic, we just call it "ugly". In > history, such writing style indicates "no integrity". I'll avoid faux-italics, then. > Yes, WQY is a sans-serif font. there's no serif in it. > > For screen display, you can mix sans-serif (WQY) and serif Chinese(eg: > WQY Bitmap Song) to make them look different. > > For printing, such mix may look ugly. > > So I suggest we just use different size of the same font to make > titles/sections, and different fonts for screen display/printing. Hm, the problem I have is: what about e.g. menu items or product names, etc.? Should I just use the normal font there and hope that people "get it"? > In history, Chinese writes from top right to bottom right (a line), > then beside that line...until top left to bottom left. > > But now (especially on computer), we just write from left to right and > top to bottom. > > These features exist for Chinese, no matter how you write. Hm. I learned that that's not the case in Korean, and I don't know if FO supports them yet, so not sure I will use that. Thanks a lot! Stefan. -- SUSE LINUX GmbH, Maxfeldstraße 5, D-90409 Nürnberg Geschäftsführer: Jeff Hawn, Jennifer Guild, Felix Imendörffer HRB 21284 (AG Nürnberg) -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] To contact the owner, e-mail: [email protected]
