On Tue, 2011-10-18 at 11:27 +0900, Masahiro Sekiguchi wrote > ... the difference of the style you are talking is something like > traditional vs modern preferences. It appears that, for whatever > reason, the designer of VL Gothic chose the traditional style for > this particular one. However, I don't think it is a bug; it is a > matter of preferences. I never said it was a bug (I think someone else used that word). I just said it was an odd feature. Thanks to the Ministry of Education page that you showed me, I have now learned that these are examples of kanji where the printed form can differ from the accepted handwritten form. > > My teacher told me that if any student wrote these kanji in the > > VL-Gothic way, they would be corrected. > I'm not sure what your teacher actually said, but I believe you > misunderstood her explanation. What she said is consistent with what several Japanese people have told me. The VL-Gothic forms of soto/GAI, uchi/KA, etc, would be regarded as wrong if a student hand-wrote them. Teachers would correct them to the customary handwritten form. However, it seems that there is more freedom in printed fonts than in handwriting. There are some fonts that use the handwritten forms. But VL Gothic is not one of them. > I'm not sure what you want, but just as an example, you can download > a PDF copy of the latest (revised last year) Joyo kanji hyo (List of > regular use Kanji)... it is a part of definitive document of modern > Japanese orthography for legal/official uses, issued by the Prime > Minister. > http://www.bunka.go.jp/kokugo_nihongo/kokujikunrei_h221130.html This is a very useful resource, thank you. Indeed, my Japanese is nowhere near as good as your English, and I had to get help in reading it. At the top of p7 it talks about kanji where there is a difference between the handwritten form and the printed form (at least in some fonts). The list there includes the kanji I asked about (soto/GAI and uchi/KA) as well as some other well-known cases where printing can differ from handwriting, such as hito/JIN, i(ru)/JYU, hachi/YA. Actually a vaguely analogous situation exists in English orthography too. The handwritten form of lowercase "g" and "a" is the "single-storey" version, but many printed fonts use the "double-storey" version. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G However, it would be very unusual to use the double-storey versions of these letters in handwriting. Many thanks for your help. Mark _______________________________________________ fonts mailing list fonts@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/fonts http://fonts.fedoraproject.org/
