>I would
>compare a speaker of English reading text in a fancy script font or Gothic
>font to someone from Japan reading simplified Chinese ideographs: Although
>the text can be read, the person reads much more slowly because the
>characters are harder to discern (read) in these fonts.
Let me make a clarification to be sure that I do not offend the people from
China, Japan, Korea, or Vietnam. This was not my intent. I specifically
did NOT intent for my statements to imply anything about comparing the
quality of shapes of ideographic characters from one country versus those
from another country; rather, the issue is how familiar a person is with the
character shapes of one country versus another.
My intent was to use an analogy to illustrate the issue for people who read
English. Text in a script font or Gothic font are harder for me to read.
My intent was to say that because many people in Japan are either less
familiar or unfamiliar with the Chinese or Korean or Vietnamese shapes, that
a Japanese person has more difficulty reading text using Chinese, Korean or
Vietnamese shapes. Similarly, I would expect that a person in China, Korea,
or Vietnam would have similar difficulties reading text in an ideographic
font from a country other than his or her country because the person is less
familiar with the shapes.
I have been following the discussion even though I cannot read Chinese,
Japanese, Korean or Vietnamese. Printing and displaying the unified
ideographic characters coded in 10646/Unicode are important issues. A
discussion of these issues needs to be added to a draft ISO technical report
that I am editing ("An operational model for characters and glyphs").
Best regards,
Ed Hart
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