Re: writing Chinese dialects

From: Arne Götje (高盛華) (arne@linux.org.tw)
Date: Mon Feb 05 2007 - 18:00:34 CST

  • Next message: vunzndi@vfemail.net: "Re: writing Chinese dialects"

    On Tuesday 06 February 2007 01:26, Philippe Verdy wrote:
    > You have forgotten to speak about:
    > * the use of parentheses: A/(B+C)
    > * the use of ideograph description characters (ICD) as binary
    > operators: ** A surrounds/encloses B
    > ** A borders B (on several sides)
    > ** A overlaps B (several overlapping positions)
    >
    > Why not using the IDC symbols instead of "+" and "/" for horizontal
    > and vertical stacking?

    I'm currently helping out to do exactly that... converting it to IDS.

    > I note that the use of "-" is quite smart (better than not using it,
    > and displaying a "?" for a missing radical.

    For the missing components (they are not radicals!), I'd suggest, we
    collect them and encode them en-bloc in the BMP (probably at the end of
    the CJK block (U+4E00 ~ U+9FFF). Reason: 1. there is still enough space
    for that, 2. the components do not need to go through IRG, 3. the
    components are mainly used for IDS, I haven't seen them yet for any
    other purpose.
    Problem would be: they don't have radicals, so they won't really fit
    into the standard radical/stroke schema.
    However, they do have CCCI (?) Codes, and therefor IMHO should be
    encoded into Unicode...
    If you guys prefer to put them into the CJK Strokes block, it's also
    fine for me... just please, let's encode them... no more '?' and '-'
    when decomposing CJK characters!

    > Such indications would help reducing the number of internal subglyphs
    > really needed in a font to compact its total size: without such glyph
    > transformation, the font would just need to rescale the component
    > glyph box to create the composed ideograph (in fact the same technic
    > can also be used also to reduce a lot the size of a Hangul font,
    > however these composition patterns are more strictly degined in
    > Hangul by the canonical decomposition of syllables into jamos,
    > because each jamo has a single and wellknown horizontal or vertical
    > composition rule, making the use of binary operators like above
    > unnecessary).

    Uhh... please don't!!! Have you ever seen CJK fonts which use scaling to
    compose missing characters? They look *ugly*! The stem width is
    different and the whole character just looks odd. Your approach would
    probably only work for stroke based fonts. But any Song or Kai style
    font (which are most common for Chinese texts) cannot use this
    approach. So, please don't even think of it. :)

    Cheers
    Arne

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    Arne Götje (高盛華) <arne@linux.org.tw>
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