RE: About Windows GTK+ BIG5... WINDOWS?!

[Mark Storer <MStorer cardiff com>]

>Hey. Asian languages don't have any screwy layout rules. Its English you 
>are thinking of. Everything in Asian languages is on a nice rectangular 
>grid, unless some dumb western typesetting system mucks it up!


HEY!  Not so.  English has it's share of goofy rules, but so does Japanese
(even by itself):

Half-width characters.  Not a big deal, but something to be aware of.

Line breaking restrictions:  There are groups of characters that are not
allowed to begin or end a line.  The usual way to handle this is to wrap a
character down from the previous line (or wrap one UP from the next).
Either way, the space of the characters on the affected lines is often
altered to maintain smooth left and right edges.  There goes the grid.  I'm
not sure how this applies to vertical text, but I'm assuming (Danger Wil
Robinson!) that the mechanics are similar.

Hanging Punctuation:  Some punctuation marks can "hang" outside the normal
paragraph borders.

There ARE proportional Japanese fonts, though I've only read about them.

"Wari-Chu":  Squeezing two lines into a space meant for one.  The 'squeezed'
characters are in a smaller point size (for obvious reasons).  I've seen
this both horizontally and vertically.

Like this:  ------
            -====-
            ------

Their ligature rules:  Some Katakana character sequences can be combined
into a single cell.  Which ones?  Heck if I know, I don't read Japanese.
And the combined character is different depending on whether you're going
horizontally or vertically.

Rubi: Rarely used Kanji can be accompanied by a pronunciation guide in
Katakana.  These phonetics appear above or below the Kanji in question,
again in a smaller size.

And then there's the equally screwy Roman/Japanese rules you alluded to...
like what to do when some proportional roman characters throw the cell
system off.

And vertical type with non-Japanese characters gets even weirder:  
For example, foreign right-to-left languages have their characters rotated
90 degrees.  Left-to-right languages get rotated 270 degrees.  That's
clock-wise, by the way.

Just to make life more exciting, sometimes those foreign characters are
printed horizontally (if they'll fit).

So don't talk to me about how pristine their type rules are.  We both know
better.

To be perfectly honest, I'm assuming you were mostly kidding in your
response... I just felt like showing off my Vast Knowledge: just enough to
get myself in trouble.  And hopefully someone will correct anything I have
wrong before one of my misconceptions crops up in front of our Japanese
client who DOES know better.  Not that I have most of these implemented, at
least not in the version currently in development.

--Mark Storer
  Software Engineer
  Cardiff Software

#include <disclaimer>
typedef std::disclaimer<Cardiff> Discard;