Re: Naming font styles for Chinese ideographs

From: Brian Yuan (byuan@ha2mpka.eng.sun.com)
Date: Thu Jul 15 1999 - 12:21:40 EDT


Markus,
        For Chinese ideographs names, traditional/simplified is better than
zh_CN/zh_TW and much better than CN/TW :).
        This is because in Mainland China (zh_CN), both Simplified Chinese and
Tranditional Chinese characters are widely used. Simplified Chinese only means
the characters in GB2312, there are only 6763 chinese characters in GB2312.

Thanks.
Brian.

>Three possible solutions that have come up are
>
> - use ISO 639 / RFC 1766 language codes, as the Unicode plane
> 14 tags and HTML use them ("ja", "zh_TW", "zh_CN", "ko", etc.),
> or a sequence of these if the font is suitable for several
> of these locales.
>
> - use ISO 3166 country codes ("JP", "CN", "TW", etc.).
>
> - use words that designate the style, for instance
> "kanji", "traditional", "simplified", etc.
>
>I had originally preferred to use the RFC 1766 codes (or a sequence of
>them if more than one are applicable) directly, such that the language
>tags from HTML, Plan14, etc. can be directly used to guide automatic
>font selection. Style words such as "kanji", "traditional",
>"simplified", etc. (any more?) would also be fine, but would then
>require a conversion table that maps RFC 1766 language codes to these
>style designators, and I am not sure whether this is worth the effort. I
>am not happy about a proposal of just using country codes, because
>nationalities seem to be much less relevant here.
>
>Any related opinions or advice would be very welcome.
>
>What would you prefer?
>
>What other style designators than "kanji", "traditional", and
>"simplified" might one want to use and register?
>
>Markus
>
>--
>Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
>Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>
>



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