Re: writing Chinese dialects

From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Tue Feb 06 2007 - 05:14:47 CST

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    From: "Arne Götje (高盛華)" <arne@linux.org.tw>
    > Uhh... please don't!!! Have you ever seen CJK fonts which use scaling to
    > compose missing characters? They look *ugly*! The stem width is
    > different and the whole character just looks odd. Your approach would
    > probably only work for stroke based fonts. But any Song or Kai style
    > font (which are most common for Chinese texts) cannot use this
    > approach. So, please don't even think of it. :)

    Why not? Do you know that fonts already support "hinting" instrustions exactly to help preserving the stroke widths (including the case of strokes with variable stroke widths) when characters are scaled down ?

    What is needed is just to move the base control points, but the stroke widths may be constrained so that their horizontal and vertical scaling remain equal in the complete composed ideograph.
    I did not suggest to just rescale the contour of glyphs.

    With such hinting definitions, it's really possible to get good looking composed ideographs, with minimum work for the font designer, as most compositions will be immediately correct, by just specifying its components and their relative layout; and in fact it reflects the way the characters are created or derived.
    Yes there are exceptions (when strokes are slightly modified, notably for surrounding traits). But it's really not the large majority of cases.



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