RE: Single Unicode Font

From: Carl W. Brown (cbrown@xnetinc.com)
Date: Tue May 22 2001 - 16:11:47 EDT


Mike,

> For those who do not know enough to tell the difference between
>Kanji typography and Hanzi typography (and Hanja typography ;-) this
yields
>no benefit and forces a meaningless choice (which script that you can't
read
>do you prefer?).

If you don't care, then print an unprintable character mark.

>added multilingual support to emacs on Win2000, I found that even
>with that OS's excellent multilingual capabilities, this is a painful thing
>to do. For instance, there is no trivial way to determine what scripts are
>supported by any given font - therefore I must keep modifying my fontset
>specification, reloading it, and looking at the "hello" page again. All
>that, and I am still limited to the scripts on the "hello" page (if I ever
>get all them!).

Facilities like mlang need to be a part of the system and easier to use.

> Also, a note on the oft-cited issue of the size problems of an
>all-purpose Unicode font. The largest font on my system is 16MB. Since it
>is probably a CJK font, I amguessing that it covers 1/3 to 1/2 the Unicode
>range (1/2 of 3.0, 1/3 of 3.1?) - to be safe, let's expand it four times,
to
>64MB. This size could still tuck neatly into the swap file of (almost) any
>personal system you could buy today. Given the expanding hardware
>requirements of newer OS's, this doesn't seem to me to be much of an issue.

If you have a single font that it could potentially have a million
characters. That is what I call insane since most people won't care about
99% of them. You will also have to provide multiple flavors for folks who
want a Farsi font with Japanese. The combinations are almost endless. Now
you are talking gigabytes. We have not talked about SanSerif or styles.

Fonts will continue to be an issue. How do I mix center-line fonts with
base line fonts? Script fonts don't work well with mono-case fonts. If I
bold CJK fonts they tend to smear rather than be more noticeable.

There is no easy solution.

Carl



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