Re: writing Chinese dialects

From: vunzndi@vfemail.net
Date: Tue Feb 06 2007 - 08:39:14 CST

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

    I have tried to do this automatically -- most hinting maintains the
    width of horiziontal amd vertical lines/strokes, slanting curved
    lines tend to become out of proportion, or ugly. It is not easy.

    To look nice in Chinese charcters have other rules, such certain
    strokes extend to fill an empty space so there are no large gaps
    inside the character, or contract to avoid touching.

    Certain styles have different rules eg strokes all about the same
    width (kaishu), horizontal strokes wide vertical strokes narrow (
    basically songti) .

      An expert calligrapher also has lots of other rules that make a
    character "good" .

    John

    Nowadays many OSes have font enhancers that make bad fonts look good.

    Quoting Philippe Verdy <verdy_p@wanadoo.fr>:

    > From: "Arne arne@linux.org.tw
    >> 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. :)
    >
    > Why not? Do you know that fonts already support "hinting"
    > instrustions exactly to help preserving the stroke widths (including
    > the case of strokes with variable stroke widths) when characters
    > are scaled down ?
    >
    > What is needed is just to move the base control points, but the
    > stroke widths may be constrained so that their horizontal and
    > vertical scaling remain equal in the complete composed ideograph.
    > I did not suggest to just rescale the contour of glyphs.
    >
    > With such hinting definitions, it's really possible to get good
    > looking composed ideographs, with minimum work for the font
    > designer, as most compositions will be immediately correct, by just
    > specifying its components and their relative layout; and in fact it
    > reflects the way the characters are created or derived.
    > Yes there are exceptions (when strokes are slightly modified,
    > notably for surrounding traits). But it's really not the large
    > majority of cases.
    >
    >
    >

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