On Wed, 23 Dec 1998, F. Avery Bishop wrote:
> > Werner LEMBERG <sx0005@sx2.hrz.uni-dortmund.de> wrote:
> > >can't be handled by your rendering system) -- of course, it's a
> > >shame that even recent software written by Apple, Adobe, or
> > >Microsoft still rely on the 1-to-1 Unicode->Glyph model...
> It's also not true for the relevant Microsoft products. Arabic, Hebrew, and
> Thai Windows 98 and Windows NT obviously don't assume a 1-1 Unicode
> character to glyph model. All versions of Windows 2000 (new name for
Problem is Korean MS-Windows is not one of relevant MS products
although that has every reason to be one of them.
> Windows NT 5.0) will be able to display these complex scripts (our name for
> those that *require* an n to m character->glyph model) correctly.
However, it's certainly the case in far East Asia version of
MS-Windows, isn't it? It's very unfortunate(as I and Mark Leisher wrote
on other occasion, it's (partly) due to inclusion of 11,172 pre-composed
Hangul syllables in Unicode. Those pre-composed syllables are not
sufficient for even modern Korean, let alone medivial Korean, and
unfortunately most people tend to assume that that's enough) that
MS(and as of now, Adobe and Apple as well. Adobe glyph list only have
pre-composed syllables and nowhere is seen any glyph for individual
Hangul Jamos to be used for dynamic shaping/composition of glyphs for
Hangul incomplete/complete syllables) ignored the fact that Korean
Hangul also has exactly the same requirement as Arabic, Hebrew, Thai,
Indic, Lao(and so forth) scripts as far as 'glyph-shaping'(or dynamic
composition of glyph) is concerned. For full Korean Hangul support,
it's essential that 'many-to-many' ('many-to-one') character-> glyph
model be applied to Hangul. Additional benefit of using that model is
drastic reduction in the size of fonts for Korean Hangul(glyphs for
pre-composed Hangul syllables are not necessary). Only commercial
entity that recognizes this important fact about Korean Hangul seems to
be 'OpenGroup'(Solaris 7 is said to include CTL and I guess it can take
care of this aspect of Korean Hangul) . Its web page on CTL lists Korean
Hangul as one of target scripts for CTL(http://www.opengroup.org).
Does MS have any plan to add Korean Hangul to those "complex scripts"
(Hebrew,Thai, Arabic, etc. Indic scripts are not supported by MS Windows,
yet, are they?)?
How about MacOS 8.5? In the early days of "Korean" MacOS(in late
80's), Apple(or its Korean partner) played around similar idea, but
later that seems to have gone. I hope Mac OS 8.5 and ATSUI(?, QuickDraw
GX?) are flexible enough to have room for handling Korean Hangul this
way.
Jungshik Shin
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