Re: glyph selection for Unicode in browsers

From: Tex Texin (tex@i18nguy.com)
Date: Fri Sep 27 2002 - 11:11:21 EDT

  • Next message: Tex Texin: "Re: glyph selection for Unicode in browsers"

    Hi,
    I am glad to see the issue has been given some attention.
    I concluded there was a problem after experimenting with some CJK
    characters that I repeated with different lang tags and could not get
    any display differences unless I used non-Unicode fonts assigned to each
    language. I did this with IE 6 and NS 7 and Opera (dont recall if it was
    6 or 7.)

    tex

    Jungshik Shin wrote:
    >
    > On Thu, 26 Sep 2002, Tex Texin wrote:
    >
    > > Yes, underlying fonts can be a Unicode architecture. That's a good
    > > thing, but invisible to end-users.
    > > I would like to keep the sense of "Unicode font" as meaning a font which
    > > supports a large number of scripts, rather than meaning one that uses
    > > Unicode for its mapping architecture.
    > >
    > > Yes, OS and browsers are getting better. My concerns center around:
    > > Is the mechanism for selecting fallback fonts language-sensitive, so
    > > that it would favor a Japanese font for Unicode Han characters that were
    > > tagged as lang:ja
    >
    > I'm a little at loss as to why you have the impression
    > that 'lang' tag has little effect on rendering of html (in
    > UTF-8. e.g. your page or IUC10 announcement page which used to be at
    > http://www.unicode.org/iuc/iuc10/x-utf8.html) by major browsers. MS
    > IE has been making use of 'lang' attribute(html) for a long time and
    > Mozilla solved the problem (although 'xml:lang' is not yet supported)
    > last December. In case of Mozilla(and Netscape 7), see
    >
    > http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=105199 (fixed.
    > where you'll find a pair of screenshots with dramatically
    > different rendering results)
    > http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=115121
    > (xml:lang : not yet fixed)
    > http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=122779 (C-L http header
    > and UTF-8 document)
    >
    > > And are the fonts labeled so that the supported language is known?
    >
    > Judging from the discussion about the issue in Xfree86-font
    > list, most of modern OTFs are. Otherwise, applications (or a library
    > for text rendering/font selection) can resort to a kind of mapping the
    > character repertoire of a font to language(s) covered as is done by
    > fontconfig for XFree86. For instance, characters in JIS X 0208 are all
    > covered, but characters from GB2312, Big5 and KS X 1001 are missing,
    > a font is likely to be Japanese.
    >
    > > Even so, I'd still need to have a large collection of fonts then.
    >
    > Indeed that's the case. If OT lang-tag is made use of and
    > multiple alternative glyphs are available in a single(or
    > a few) pan-script Unicode font(s), you'd not have to.
    >
    > Jungshik

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