From: Kenneth Whistler (kenw@sybase.com)
Date: Fri Jun 20 2003 - 17:44:25 EDT
Philippe Verdy,
> But it's true that complex scripts like Han will be poorly rendered in Bold
> or Italic... But does someone actually wants to read Han text with Bold
> characters (or even worse slanted with Italic) ?
What is true is that use of italicized text is unusual
in Chinese or Japanese body text--certainly not with the frequency
or same range of functions as occurs in Latin typography.
Bold text is not that unusual, however.
Han (and Japanese kana) font designers have adapted a whole range
of Western typographic ideas on top of traditional stylistic
ideas for East Asian fonts, and it is not at all strange to find
many ranges of bold/heaviness in fonts for display type,
advertising, notices, and such, as well as different kinds of
oblique or italic faces as well. You even see inverse-obliqued
faces for vertical display, where the vertical lines of the
characters stay vertical, but the horizontal lines are
obliqued up to the left, to give the visual effect of angled
text while maintaining vertical alignment.
Just browse in any modern Chinese or Japanese magazine to see a great
range of such effects.
>
> There are etter choice than Italic for Han: use a different font style,
This is generally true. One wouldn't want to deal with glyphs in
a Han font which are just algorithmically italicized in the
renderer. Those would, indeed, generally be both ugly and hard to
read.
> I think that Italic is to avoid for most Asian scripts, as readers are not
> used to it.
For body text, in documents or on web pages, I would agree.
--Ken
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