Re: japanese vs. chinese fonts

[Kenichi Handa <handa@m17n.org>]

In article <20081002.113032.155350320.wl@gnu.org>, Werner LEMBERG <wl@gnu.org> writes:

> > The debian description also says:
> > 
> >     This font provides full coverage of GBK (CP936) charset, CJK
> >     Unified Ideographs, as well as the code-points needed for zh_CN,
> >     zh_SG, zh_TW, zh_HK, zh_MO, ja (Japanese) and ko (Korean)
> >     locales for fontconfig.

> Hmm.  Does this font also provides proper `localized' glyphs, this is,
> you select an OpenType language tag so that you get proper glyph
> shapes?  They can vary considerably (and this is what Miles
> disturbes).  Without this, the font shouldn't announce itself as
> covering more than a single CJK *language*.

I've just downloaded that font and checked the contents.
No, it doesn't have a LangSys for Japanese in GSUB table.
So, there's not that much Emacs can do.  If you want to
avoid using that font totally (i.e. don't use it even for
Chinese), you can use face-ignored-fonts.

> Ken Lunde, the leading CJK expert of Adobe, wrote a few years ago an
> article regarding CJK glyph shapes (for a Unicode conference).  He
> estimates that about a third of all CJK glyphs (this means
> approx. 20000 characters!) need localized forms.

> An additional complication is ideographic variation (this is something
> on the character level, thus relevant to editors like Emacs), cf.

>   http://unicode.org/reports/tr37/

Yes.  That's one of ugly Unicode features I hate.  I have
not yet got a good idea how to handle it.  I hope no one use
such a dirty feature.

---
Kenichi Handa
handa@ni.aist.go.jp