Re: Ideographic Description Characters

From: John Jenkins (jenkins@apple.com)
Date: Mon Dec 08 2003 - 13:19:54 EST

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    On Dec 8, 2003, at 10:25 AM, Philippe Verdy wrote:

    > At least, IDC would really speed up the work of unification of various
    > repertoire sources and help avoid duplicates. It seems that, even if
    > IDC
    > allows several compositions, a sort of canonical ideographic
    > decomposition
    > (not a NFD or NFKD decomposition!) could be created to match these
    > characters with a precise 2D composition model based on IDC's.
    >

    There are too many ambiguities and other problems that make this wildly
    impractical.

    > Such database would also help the creation of ideographic fonts, by
    > allowing
    > to compose rapidly a first version of a complete Han font with very few
    > glyphs for radicals or strokes (after this automatic step, it could be
    > compared to carefully designed glyphs, to author the font with careful
    > adjustments such as kerning, partial overlays, or small variations of
    > stroke
    > widths/length/angle.
    > This would mean lower costs to develop a functional Han font.
    >

    Actually, IDSs are ill-suited for making fonts, since they
    under-specify data. The CDL discussed at the last UTC is far, far
    better, and other systems are actually used by font designers.

    ========
    John H. Jenkins
    jenkins@apple.com
    jhjenkins@mac.com
    http://homepage..mac.com/jhjenkins/



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