Re: How do we get a full 18x18 unified CJK collection?

[Markus Kuhn <Markus.Kuhn@cl.cam.ac.uk>]

Birger Langkjer wrote on 1999-10-12 10:10 UTC:
> The 9x18 and 16x18 in Markus' ucs-fonts are supposed to go together, so
> you only need 2 fonts for the entire unicode repertoire. 

The sizes are 9x18 and 18x18.

The current 18x18 covers only the JIS X0208 repertoire, because it was a
JIS 16x16 font that I extended to also cover all characters of ISO
8859-1, CP1252, and CP437.

I am still a bit confused on whether it is really necessary to have
different fonts for Chinese and Taiwanese for instance, because my
understanding was that the Unicode course separation rule should take
care of this (simplified Chinese and traditional Chinese have not been
Unified by Unicode). I do understand that Japanese users have strong
preferences for a specific subset of all possible Han design styles and
that Chinese readers are much more tolerant to glyph variations and
occasionally even use Japanese styles.

How good is Roman Czyborra's 16x16 Unifont on

  http://czyborra.com/unifont/

for CJK users? Is the Han style it uses more or less consistent in
itself or is it more of a quick patchwork?

The BDF files his scripts produce are broken in many ways, but I can fix
this easily. Shall we extract and pad the double-width characters from
Unicode and place them into 18x18.bdf? We can still keep 18x18ja around
for Japanese users who really can't stand Chinese fonts, but I would
hope that unifont is acceptable at least for Chinese, Taiwanese and
Korean users.

If people like Unifont, then what I would do it pad it by 1 pixel on
each side and turn it this way into an 18x18.bdf font that covers all
Han characters and more for the -misc-fixed-* collection. Common CJK
practice seems to be to have 16x16 glyphs with ink touching all sides of
the 16x16 box, and then the display software is supposed add additional
white pixel space between the glyphs. I don't like this, because it
breaks up block graphics, so I'd rather have fully padded CJK fonts,
which is how we got to the 18x18 size. The other reason for 18x18 was
that we had already 9x15, which after a headroom extension to
accommodate overstriking combining accents above became 9x18, which
leads to 18x18 as the natural corresponding double-width font.

If there is a strong demand, I'll produce an 18x18 version of Roman's
unifont as the main double-width font for 9x18 next weekend. No problem,
just let me know what you think on how useful it is. I have also to get
in touch with Roman with regard to how to coordinate further maintenance
of the font.

Markus

-- 
Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
Email: mkuhn at acm.org,  WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>

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