Re: etc/HELLO markup etc.

[handa <handa@gnu.org>]

In article <838t0iasju.fsf@gnu.org>, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

> > Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > > Which markup is not necessary for display, in your opinion?
> > 
> > At most all that's useful is markup that distinguishes Chinese and Japanese 
> > variants of Han characters; this might also include hanja (Korean) and Chữ Nôm 
> > (Vietnamese) variants if we ever added such characters to etc/HELLO. Such markup 
> > might be useful because a significant set of east Asian users dislike Unicode's 
> > Han unification and prefer specific variants of Han characters. I'm not aware of 
> > any other set of users who dislike unification in that way.

> I'm not yet sure this is only about Han unification.  Using charsets
> for specifying fonts is a general feature in Emacs, which can be used
> to control which fonts are selected independently of what the OS
> facilities such as fontconfig do.

> I hope Handa-san will be able to comment on this stuff.

> If Han unification is the only important user of the charset property,
> then yes, we could remove the rest of the charset info from HELLO.

Long ago, the quality of fonts designed for a specific regacy charset
were far better than so-called Unicode fonts even for non-Han charaters.
So, the charset information for non-Han charsets did have some meaning.
But, I don't know the current situation.  Perhaps, it is good to remove
them and wait for complaint from users.

---
K. Handa
handa@gnu.org