Around 23 o'clock on Oct 25, Ambrose Li wrote: > If I could ask the question again, would this mean that > "Big5" would be considered "supported" only when all the > 13051 characters are supported? That's a trick question -- 'Big5' is not a language, but a text encoding. Fontconfig doesn't concern itself with supporting encodings, but only in supporting 'orthographies' for individual languages, those Unicode values necessary to represent the bulk of words in the standard character set for the language as used in a particular territory. I gratefully accept authoritative changes to the orthographies that fontconfig uses in computing language support for each font; the ones that I have were gathered from a wide variety of sources. For European scripts, I was able to rely on the fine work of Michael Everson (http:// www.evertype.com). For other latin and cyrillic scripts, I found the Institute of the Estonian language (http://www.eki.ee) very useful. For other languages, I scrounged around the net. I recall spending a day or so looking for an authoritative reference for the orthography of Luxemborgish which is related to German but had no official written representation until sometime after WWII. The Unicode standard provided quite a bit of help with languages using unique scripts, although the coverage for those languages is often far more comprehensive than used with any kind of regularity (or provided in fonts, for some). Again, local expertise is the best information, unfortunately fluency in a language does not equate to expertise in the character set. For the Han languages, I relied heavily on the tables which transcode between Unicode and standard local encodings. I know those are probably way too inclusive, but I don't have a better source at the current time, and as the goal is to identify fonts supporting a particular language, it turns out to work relatively well -- most fonts for zh-tw started as Big5 fonts and generally cover all of the Han glyphs in that encoding quite well. I'd really like to get better references for these orthographies, perhaps someone on this list can point me at national standards for each language that lists exactly the characters considered "required" for representing each one. -keith
