On Sun, Oct 26, 2003 at 07:42:16AM -0800, Keith Packard wrote: > > And not all traditional Chinese fonts support the bulk of > > Big5; decorative fonts may support only the "frequently > > used characters", i.e., the first 5401/13051 = 41% of > > the original Big5 space, a lot of these aren't even Han > > characters; I believe this would make fontconfig conclude > > that such fonts do not support Chinese. > > Insomuch as they can't really be used to correctly display > nearly all documents, this statement is true. Much as many > decorative Latin fonts include only upper case, you wouldn't > want one of them picked to present messages to the user. Theoretically this is correct and makes perfect sense. However, I would reason that beyond a certain percentage of incomplete coverage (perhaps with the additional condition that a font must completely cover the first 5401 characters in Big5, and perhaps only if the FreeType backend is being used), a font should be considered "supports Chinese" even though it does not cover all 13051 glyphs in Big5. Revisiting the "sans" family: Even in Microsoft Windows, there is *no* free (in whatever sense) sans font covering all of Big5 (unless you only use Windows 2000 or later, in which case you have "SimSun"). Instead, an augmented GB2312 font, "MS Hei", is used for the "sans" font for traditional Chinese. This is despite the fact that "MS Hei" cannot display "nearly all documents" encoded in Big5. (On GNU/Linux systems, AR PL KaiTiM Big5 is often mapped as "sans". Typographically speaking, this is wrong, though in practice probably nothing better could be done; the "kai" family is a stylized calligraphic type, which when mapped to Western typographic terminology should strictly speaking be classed as "italic" [cursive forms deriving from stylized handwriting, not necessarily slanted per se].) Or perhaps there should be a property specifying that a font "most likely will support" a given language. I don't know if I am making sense here. -- Ambrose LI Cheuk-Wing <a.c.li@xxxxxxxx> http://ada.dhs.org/~acli/
