RE: Dynamic shaping/composition of glyphs and Korean Hangul

From: F. Avery Bishop (averyb@microsoft.com)
Date: Mon Dec 28 1998 - 17:14:44 EST


I don't know what our plans are for dynamic composition of combining Jamos.
I suppose we could do it by treating them as ligatures in the OpenType GSUB
table, but our current complex scripts engine does not support this. We
would need someone to come up with a font with the necessary table entries.

Just out of curiosity, about how many Hangul syllables in modern use would
you say are not covered in Unicode? How common are they?

F. Avery Bishop
Program Manager, Multilingual Developer Communications
averyb@microsoft.com

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jungshik Shin [SMTP:jshin@pantheon.yale.edu]
> Sent: Wednesday, December 23, 1998 3:05 PM
> To: Unicode List
> Subject: Dynamic shaping/composition of glyphs and Korean Hangul
>
> On Wed, 23 Dec 1998, F. Avery Bishop wrote:
>
> > > Werner LEMBERG <sx0005@sx2.hrz.uni-dortmund.de> wrote:
>
> > > >can't be handled by your rendering system) -- of course, it's a
> > > >shame that even recent software written by Apple, Adobe, or
> > > >Microsoft still rely on the 1-to-1 Unicode->Glyph model...
>
> > It's also not true for the relevant Microsoft products. Arabic, Hebrew,
> and
> > Thai Windows 98 and Windows NT obviously don't assume a 1-1 Unicode
> > character to glyph model. All versions of Windows 2000 (new name for
>
> Problem is Korean MS-Windows is not one of relevant MS products
> although that has every reason to be one of them.
>
>
> > Windows NT 5.0) will be able to display these complex scripts (our name
> for
> > those that *require* an n to m character->glyph model) correctly.
>
> However, it's certainly the case in far East Asia version of
> MS-Windows, isn't it? It's very unfortunate(as I and Mark Leisher wrote
> on other occasion, it's (partly) due to inclusion of 11,172 pre-composed
> Hangul syllables in Unicode. Those pre-composed syllables are not
> sufficient for even modern Korean, let alone medivial Korean, and
> unfortunately most people tend to assume that that's enough) that
> MS(and as of now, Adobe and Apple as well. Adobe glyph list only have
> pre-composed syllables and nowhere is seen any glyph for individual
> Hangul Jamos to be used for dynamic shaping/composition of glyphs for
> Hangul incomplete/complete syllables) ignored the fact that Korean
> Hangul also has exactly the same requirement as Arabic, Hebrew, Thai,
> Indic, Lao(and so forth) scripts as far as 'glyph-shaping'(or dynamic
> composition of glyph) is concerned. For full Korean Hangul support,
> it's essential that 'many-to-many' ('many-to-one') character-> glyph
> model be applied to Hangul. Additional benefit of using that model is
> drastic reduction in the size of fonts for Korean Hangul(glyphs for
> pre-composed Hangul syllables are not necessary). Only commercial
> entity that recognizes this important fact about Korean Hangul seems to
> be 'OpenGroup'(Solaris 7 is said to include CTL and I guess it can take
> care of this aspect of Korean Hangul) . Its web page on CTL lists Korean
> Hangul as one of target scripts for CTL(http://www.opengroup.org).
>
> Does MS have any plan to add Korean Hangul to those "complex scripts"
> (Hebrew,Thai, Arabic, etc. Indic scripts are not supported by MS Windows,
> yet, are they?)?
>
> How about MacOS 8.5? In the early days of "Korean" MacOS(in late
> 80's), Apple(or its Korean partner) played around similar idea, but
> later that seems to have gone. I hope Mac OS 8.5 and ATSUI(?, QuickDraw
> GX?) are flexible enough to have room for handling Korean Hangul this
> way.
>
> Jungshik Shin



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