Re: Hangul Jamo and wcwidth()

[Markus Kuhn <Markus.Kuhn@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Otfried Cheong wrote on 2000-03-07 14:13 UTC:
> I don't see a good reason why one shouldn't allow the possibility of
> viewing a non-conjoint form of syllables.  After all, you also include
> some representation for combining marks.

For combining marks, it is to some degree feasible to let applications
such as xterm generate them on-the-fly by simply overstriking two
glyphs. However, I don't see, how this would work with the the
conjoining Jamo. It was my understanding that you actually have to
hand-generate the Hangul glyphs, as the Jamo components are not located
at fixed geometrix positions within the glyph. If I set wcwidth() to 0
as you suggest, xterm would simply overstrike the glyphs, which is also
not too useful. If we fix something at wcwidth, I'd rather prefer to
set all Jamo to either 1 or 2.

But as I said, at the moment, we are only talking about a function that
selects whether the narrow or the wide DEFAULT_CHARACTER will be
displayed for a Jamo. I don't see conjoining Jamos being used generally
in POSIX any time soon (except for specialized word processors with
their own output methods), just like with the Indic scripts. 99% of
Korean users (except scholars who want to use medival forms in their
filenames) should be very happy with the U+AC00 forms.

> I think the latter is probably true.  Linux is quite popular in Korea
> and there's more than one free X-IM available.  I've quickly looked at
> the sources for hanIM (ftp://ftp.mizi.com/pub/hanIM) and it seems to
> use ordinary 'English' keysym's to feed its IM.  I've never seen these
> Korean keysyms, and don't really know how they are supposed to be
> used.

You probably misunderstood: The keysyms are all in English of course.
The above mentioned C file just contains a column with the UTF-8 encoded
Unicode mapping, and to display that I placed some glyphs into the
conjoining Jamo region of 6x13.bdf. I will remove them again, and I will
also remove the entire Korean part of xterm's keysym2ucs mapping. Korean
Unicode users will have to wait until we have UTF-8 locales running and
then their IM has to be made fit to produce UTF-8. Or use cut&paste from
the font repertoire files as the most universal input method available
in the mean time ...

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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