[prev in list] [next in list] [prev in thread] [next in thread] 

List:       xfree-i18n
Subject:    Re: [I18n]Unicode apps and 10646 Fonts
From:       Markus Kuhn <mgk25 () cam ! ac ! uk>
Date:       2001-08-31 22:40:35
[Download RAW message or body]

On Fri, 31 Aug 2001, Brian Stell wrote:
> Markus Kuhn wrote:
> > On Thu, 30 Aug 2001, Brian Stell wrote:
> > > The XLFD implies the language by the fonts charset
> > > (Registry-Encoding) but for this does not work for 10646
> > > fonts.
> >
> > We use already the ADD_STYLE_NAME field to indicate the
> > language-dependent CJK style preference. That usage of the
> > ADD_STYLE_NAME field could be extended quite easily further.
>
> This would certianly help the Han dis-ambiguation problem.
>
> Is there some way to indicate a font supports multiple languages?
>
> For example, Cyberbit supports quite a few.

The only notation I could think of is a comma separated list of
ISO 639-1 language codes.

If that is the case, then it would be useful to have a registry set up,
which minimum coverage is required for which langauge. Shouldn't be too
difficult given the wealth of existing documents on that subject. I'd
argue that the minimum font coverage for English (en) shall be all of
CP1252, which allows "en" to be used as a template for all West European
languages.  Minimum coverage for "ja" should probably be JIS X 0208 plus
CP1252, etc.

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/download/uniset.tar.gz
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html#subsets

Using a language code goes well with HTML and POSIX locale naming
practice. Other subset candidates such as UCS collections, Unicode blocks,
ISO 15924 (Code for the representation of names of scripts,
http://www.egt.ie/tc37tc46.html ), etc. just lead to even more tables and
confusion.

Who would be interested in managing such a registry? W3C?

Markus

-- 
Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
Email: mkuhn at acm.org,  WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>

_______________________________________________
I18n mailing list
I18n@XFree86.Org
http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/i18n

[prev in list] [next in list] [prev in thread] [next in thread]