From: Jungshik Shin (jshin@mailaps.org)
Date: Fri Sep 27 2002 - 10:52:12 EDT
On Thu, 26 Sep 2002, Tex Texin wrote:
> Yes, underlying fonts can be a Unicode architecture. That's a good
> thing, but invisible to end-users.
> I would like to keep the sense of "Unicode font" as meaning a font which
> supports a large number of scripts, rather than meaning one that uses
> Unicode for its mapping architecture.
>
> Yes, OS and browsers are getting better. My concerns center around:
> Is the mechanism for selecting fallback fonts language-sensitive, so
> that it would favor a Japanese font for Unicode Han characters that were
> tagged as lang:ja
I'm a little at loss as to why you have the impression
that 'lang' tag has little effect on rendering of html (in
UTF-8. e.g. your page or IUC10 announcement page which used to be at
http://www.unicode.org/iuc/iuc10/x-utf8.html) by major browsers. MS
IE has been making use of 'lang' attribute(html) for a long time and
Mozilla solved the problem (although 'xml:lang' is not yet supported)
last December. In case of Mozilla(and Netscape 7), see
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=105199 (fixed.
where you'll find a pair of screenshots with dramatically
different rendering results)
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=115121
(xml:lang : not yet fixed)
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=122779 (C-L http header
and UTF-8 document)
> And are the fonts labeled so that the supported language is known?
Judging from the discussion about the issue in Xfree86-font
list, most of modern OTFs are. Otherwise, applications (or a library
for text rendering/font selection) can resort to a kind of mapping the
character repertoire of a font to language(s) covered as is done by
fontconfig for XFree86. For instance, characters in JIS X 0208 are all
covered, but characters from GB2312, Big5 and KS X 1001 are missing,
a font is likely to be Japanese.
> Even so, I'd still need to have a large collection of fonts then.
Indeed that's the case. If OT lang-tag is made use of and
multiple alternative glyphs are available in a single(or
a few) pan-script Unicode font(s), you'd not have to.
Jungshik
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