[WEB4LIB] Fonts

[Andrew Cunningham]

Walt_Crawford at notes.rlg.org wrote:
> Andrew provides an answer that's certainly appropriate _for those pages
> using a wide range of non-Roman scripts_.
> 
> Eureka does in fact use Unicode encoding to display a range of non-Roman
> languages (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Cyrillic, Arabic, Hebrew, Yiddish),
> but those scripts don't appear to require the kind of typeface selection
> Andrew discusses.
> 

Actually Chinese, Japanese and Korean esp. Japanese) has generated a lot 
of comment over the years on the unicode mailing list wrt Han Unification.

To quote form the Unicode FAQ

"Broadly speaking, there are four traditions for character shapes in 
East Asia: traditional Chinese (used primarily in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and 
overseas Chinese communities), simplified Chinese (used primarily in 
mainland China and Singapore), Japanese, and Korean. Using a single font 
for all four locales allows the characters to be legible, but means that 
some characters may look odd. For optimal results a system localized for 
use in Japan, for example, should use a font designed explicitly for use 
with Japanese, rather than a generic Unihan font. [JJ] and [KW]"

http://www.unicode.org/unicode/faq/han_cjk.html#2

furth on the FAQ it uses an illustartion of the character 草 (U+8349):

"There are occasional instances of unified characters whose typical 
Chinese glyph and typical Japanese glyph are distinct enough that the 
Chinese glyph will be unfamiliar to the typical Japanese reader, e.g., 
U+76F4. To prevent legibility problems for Japanese readers, it is 
advisable to use a Japanese-style font when presenting Unihan text to 
Japanese readers"

basically Japanese readers prefer, or maybe require is a better word, 
Unicode fonts optimised for Japanese.

In theory, CJK requires four fonts, or an opentype font that carries 
multiple langauge specific glyph variations (assuming the software being 
used is capable of using langauge specific features of fonts). Generally 
separate fonts are made available for Simplified Chinese, Tarditional 
Chinese, Japanese and Korean (in those case were Hanja are being used). 
Han Unification means that the different versions of a aprticular Hanzi, 
Kanji and Hanja may share exactly unicode codepoint, but have different 
culturally prefered glyphs (which may or may not affect the readibility 
of the text).

Cyrillic usually isn't an issue. John Hudson does give an illustration 
[http://www.microsoft.com/typography/developers/opentype/detail.htm] of 
cyrillic characters in italic form , where Serbian uses a different 
glyph from the standard Cyrillic glyph.

With Hebrew, you may choose to use different fonts if the text is 
"pointed" Hebrew and the default font doesn't support such features.



> We've consistently found that, at least in IE (and apparently in Netscape
> and Opera, but it's harder to be sure), the browser automatically switches
> between the user-chosen typeface and the nearest Unicode-equipped
> alternative as required by the text--even switching back and forth within a
> single field (e.g., dates in an Arabic or Hebrew entry, where there's also
> directionality switching). We were a little surprised by that, but it
> helped our decision not to force typeface.
> 

Just standard microsoft font-linking technology at work. It can be 
frustrating at times in some applications like Office XP, when you want 
to use a specific font, but Microsoft's feafult font-linking technology 
decides that your font doesn't support the unicode range you are using.

bidi support is ok for those characters that have strong/explicit 
directionality. characters that have weak or neutral directionality can 
cause dispoplay problems. In terms of web pages (if you use an explicit 
dir="rtl" attribute on the page then you should be ok. if the page is 
implicitly LTR instead , the arabic characters will display RTL but 
neitral characters like punctuation may display LTR instead. Messy.

Although I do like the mirroring technology, getting the scroll bar on 
the left of the screen, and support for Arabic text justification, esp. 
Kashida and Newspaper justification styles.


Andrew