Re: Composition of not included Chinese characters

From: Arne Goetje (arne@linux.org.tw)
Date: Tue Sep 25 2007 - 19:37:52 CDT

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    vunzndi@vfemail.net wrote:
    > Quoting Gerrit Sangel <z0idberg@gmx.de>:
    >
    >> Hello,
    >>
    >> I have a question concerning Han characters:
    >>
    >> I want to write Biáng biáng (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biang) in an
    >> ordinary text. As far as I know, the character is not included in
    >> Unicode, so
    >> it seems that there is no possibility to just write it.
    >>
    >> I read about the Ideographic Description Characters, but as far as I?ve
    >> understood it, they are only for graphically description of a
    >> character, so
    >> the reader has to compose it for himself in his mind or rather on a
    >> sheet of
    >> paper.
    >>
    >
    > Yes and no. This is what people do, it would be acceptable for an
    > application to display an IDS as a single glyph, though I do not know of
    > any applications that do such at present.

    http://zhongwen.tw
    Currently it is a java application to compose a picture of the glyph
    from IDS sequences. AFAIK attempts are made to get this functionality
    into the freetype library. I heard that a patch has been developed and
    tested already.
    However, the drawback is, that currently only a simple stroke based font
    can be used, which does not necessarily fit well with the surrounding text.

    I, on the other hand, will make pre-composed glyphs and give them a ccmp
    tag with their respective IDS sequence for the characters I know of and
    which fit the purpose of my fonts.

    Cheers
    Arne

    - --
    Arne Götje (高盛華) <arne@linux.org.tw>
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