We currently have a discussion on the XFree86 mailing list on how to
name different fonts in a family of fonts that are only distinguished by
whether the style of the CJK ideographs is that one used in say Japan,
mainland China, Taiwan, or Korea. The idea is to put a code for this
distinction into the ADD_STLYE field of the X11 font names (XLFD).
Three possible solutions that have come up are
- use ISO 639 / RFC 1766 language codes, as the Unicode plane
14 tags and HTML use them ("ja", "zh_TW", "zh_CN", "ko", etc.),
or a sequence of these if the font is suitable for several
of these locales.
- use ISO 3166 country codes ("JP", "CN", "TW", etc.).
- use words that designate the style, for instance
"kanji", "traditional", "simplified", etc.
I had originally preferred to use the RFC 1766 codes (or a sequence of
them if more than one are applicable) directly, such that the language
tags from HTML, Plan14, etc. can be directly used to guide automatic
font selection. Style words such as "kanji", "traditional",
"simplified", etc. (any more?) would also be fine, but would then
require a conversion table that maps RFC 1766 language codes to these
style designators, and I am not sure whether this is worth the effort. I
am not happy about a proposal of just using country codes, because
nationalities seem to be much less relevant here.
Any related opinions or advice would be very welcome.
What would you prefer?
What other style designators than "kanji", "traditional", and
"simplified" might one want to use and register?
Markus
-- Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>
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