From: John Cowan (jcowan@reutershealth.com)
Date: Fri Sep 27 2002 - 09:16:24 EDT
Tex Texin scripsit:
> I do need to point out that user preference is problematic if it means
> that for a user to display a multilingual document, the user has to go
> thru and specify font preferences for languages they know nothing about.
How can this be avoided? If I print a document containing a small amount
of text in Georgian (in a bibliography entry, say), I am not going to
know if the Georgian font is the most beautiful thing ever made or one
that is utterly illegible. I have to pass it to someone who can read
Georgian and wait for the "Aah!" or "Arrgh!" as the case may be.
Or I can take the default and hope for the best.
> Just because I don't read CJK, doesn't mean I don't have legitimate
> needs to display or print CJK in a typographically correct way.
> Librarians, Commerce exchanges, mailing lists, localizers, etc.
Since the issue is not really a matter of language, but of typographic
tradition (see John Jenkins's excellent discussion of this question at
http://www.unicode.org/unicode/faq/han_cjk.html#3), there is no such thing
as a "typographically correct way". In particular (as noted in the FAQ),
it is commonplace for a Japanese document that quotes Chinese text to
use Japanese-style glyphs for both languages, as this is apparently less
jarring to the average Japanese reader.
> But although you didn't quite say this, a user could provide a
> preference not for font, but language, i.e. if the script is CJK,
> display it as C or J or K (or T). And given the language the font
> mechanisms would do a reasonable thing.
That is reasonable provided you grasp what is meant by "language
preference" here: namely, typographical tradition preference. It would
be like choosing between Fraktur and Antiqua when reading German text:
this too is rather broader than a mere font difference.
-- A mosquito cried out in his pain, John Cowan "A chemist has poisoned my brain!" http://www.ccil.org/~cowan The cause of his sorrow http://www.reutershealth.com Was para-dichloro- jcowan@reutershealth.com Diphenyltrichloroethane. (aka DDT)
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