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

[Thomas Chan <thomas@atlas.datexx.com>]

On Tue, 12 Oct 1999, Otfried Cheong wrote:

> 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.

DynaLab apparently has already done this, with a font that contains
additional glyphs for variants where they exist.  The press release 
(April 30, 1999) claims over 50,000 glyphs:

  http://www.dynalab.com.hk/new/UniFont.htm

There was also coverage in an issue of Multilingual magazine (sorry,
don't have a citation).	


BTW, what do you think of 
http://www.dynalab.com.hk/new/Standard_Kai.htm ?
It would seem that at least some segment of Hong Kong disagrees
with fonts from Taiwan, even though they are both use "Traditional
Chinese".

 
> 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!

Although not 18x18 size, there is a 24x24 font that can be used to cover
all of the CJK characters region if you don't like Frankenstein fonts:

  ftp://metalab.unc.edu/pub/Linux/X11/fonts/cmexfonts-0.1.tar.gz
    (ignore the smaller font in the archive--it's scaled down
     from the 24x24 original)
  http://www.debian.org/Packages/stable/x11/xfntbig5p-cmex24m.html
    (claims to be DFSG-free)

The original is ultimately from CMEX (www.cmex.org.tw).  It's in Big5+
arrangement, but could be converted to Unicode.

Alternatively, if someone has a GBK font from mainland China, that
could also be converted to cover the entire CJK characters region.
With Big5+ and GBK fonts out there (somewhere) that are equivalent in
terms of content, there's no reason to build hybrid fonts.  (At least
for Chinese users.)

 
Thomas Chan
tc31@cornell.edu

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