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

[Otfried Cheong <otfried@cs.ust.hk>]

 > 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.

Also, 9x18 is a sans-serif font, 18x18 is a serif font (at least the
full-width latin characters are, the Kanji are fine).

 > 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.

In the long run, there should be two fonts, one with Japanese/Korean
glyph preferences, one with Chinese glyph preferences.  (For those not
familiar with the topic, I've put a little essay on Han unification at
http://www.cs.ust.hk/~otfried/Mule/unihan.html.)  I'm not aware of any
character where more than two variants are necessary---but I may be
wrong.  It will be interesting to do some research to find how many
glyphs need to be different---I once heard a claim for 50%, but that
seems exaggerated to me.

This is a long term project, though, and a font that covers all of
Unicode in a uniform style would be useful and preferable to what I
have now, even if I couldn't chose between glyph variants!

 > 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?

It's a patchwork, made by putting public domain X-fonts together with
a certain priority (Japanese first, so Japanese will always see their
preferred variant).  It's usable, though, and the style variations are
not too bad (you can't really express much style in a 16x16 cell
anyway).  Many glyphs are poor, but they were already so in the
original fonts.

The reason why I haven't changed the default setup in emacs-utf to use
his font for all CJK characters is that it doesn't give anything
new---you see exactly the same glyphs in Emacs now!

 > 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.

Since unifont used Japanese glyphs as the first choice, I don't think
it is necessary to keep 18x18ja---it should be a subset of unifont. If
you want to make sure that Japanese users are happy, I would rather
keep the CJK glyphs from 18x18ja and merge in the other glyphs from
unifont, instead of maintaining two fonts.

Otfried


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