Re: What is a Chinese font?

From: vunzndi@vfemail.net
Date: Tue Feb 26 2008 - 23:39:15 CST

  • Next message: Andrew West: "Re: What is a Chinese font?"

    Quoting mpsuzuki@hiroshima-u.ac.jp:

    > Dear Sir,
    >
    > Nice to hear the samples were something useful for you.
    > Indeed, fontforge is appropriate and easy tool to change
    > the values. In fact, I used fontforge for preliminary
    > test - afterwards, I used binary editor to make minimum
    > modified samples.
    >

    Dear Sir,

    yes very helpful.

    >>
    >> Some quick test results
    >>
    >> on Linux (debian)
    >>
    >> abiword - works with any font including my original
    >>

    correction - for some reason the binary editor modified versions fail.
    Though the same settings when adjusted in fontforge work.

    >
    > At present I don't have abiword in my hand - most Linux
    > applications let fontconfig library to manage the font
    > files, and fontconfig checks the character coverage by
    > cmap/loca/glyf, so the UnicodeRange and CodePageRange
    > in OS/2 have no effects, I guess. fontconfig-2.2 didn't
    > check the complex text layout feature support, but
    > fontconfig-2.4 checks GSUB, GPOS and Silf tables to
    > pass appropriate fonts to the text layout libraries.
    >

    This is good to know. I have yet to master all the in's and out's of
    fontconfig. These tests do confirm as you say that fontconfig uses
    neither the UnicodeRange nor the CodePageRange. Even in Windows this
    appears to be application dependent as Abiword does not check this,
    whereas Word and Wordpad do.

    >
    > We can find that Apple reserved a few flags in head table
    > to indicate the requirement of complex text layout feature.
    > Please check head.flags bit 7,8,9,10 and head.fontDirectionHint in
    > http://developer.apple.com/textfonts/TTRefMan/RM06/Chap6head.html
    > OpenType specification does not carry over these flags.
    > However, yet I've not investigated how Mac OS font
    > framework check these values.
    >

    My aim is to produce crossplatform fonts.

    I am now using the OS/2 UnicodeRange and CodePageRange settings from
    opensource uming.ttf, which the smaller fonts are related to. Further
    down the line the glyphs may go back into that providing the question
    of more complex features can be handled properly.

    Thank you again.

    John

    > Regards,
    > mpsuzuki
    >
    >

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