Re: Pango Unicode coverage

[Steve Underwood <steveu coppice org>]

James Su wrote:

> Hi,
> There is a TTF font released by Founder Corp. China, which includes more
> than 70000 characters. Please visit:
>
> http://www.founder.com.cn/fontweb/chanpinzl/CP_chaoda.htm
>
> and
>
> http://www.founder.com.cn/fontweb/chanpinzl/FA_chaoda.htm
>
> to get the detailed information for that font (It's in Chinese).
>
> The font uses *surrogate* space in Unicode to encode those characters. I
> think it should use UTF-16 as its internal encoding. According the
> article, Windows 2000 has support it.
>
> This font is included in Office XP (at least in its Chinese Version).
> The font size is 40M bytes. Here is the ftdump output for this font:


Reading those pages, the font you describe does indeed seem to cover 
over 70,000 characters, including all the C, J and K characters. Can you 
explain something to us? My understanding is that from some date around 
now it becomes illegal to sell computer systems in China which do not 
comprehensively handle GB18030, which means they also need to 
comprehensively handle Unicode 3.1. Does that mean the Linux vendors 
will need at least one font as comprehensive as this one to legally sell 
their products? Does such a free font exist?

Regards,
Steve