On Sat, 2004-07-24 at 11:54, Theppitak Karoonboonyanan wrote: > I would like to say, the relatively small size is currently inevitable, > unless the same font is chosen to render both Thai and English > characters. > > The reason is that Thai font designs have to reserve upper and lower > space for placing combining characters [1]. So, with the same point size, > Thai base characters are always smaller than those of typical Latin fonts. > This is true for other multi-level scripts, such as Laos, Khmer, Tibetan > as well. However, those fonts always provide English glyphs with proper > relative size. So, if the same font is chosen, the relative size would fit > well. > > On the other hand, some fonts, such as FreeSerif, try to cope with this > problem by scaling up Thai glyphs instead, letting the upper/lower marks > be placed beyond the ascender/descender. While this works in some > cases, the marks just get clipped in some others. Breaking the rule is > always not safe. > > So, the ideal is to extend the "point size" definition to cover other > scripts than Latin as well. If you have a font like FreeSerif that tries to covers all scripts, then you get an inevitable problem. Different scripts need different line spacings. This is one reason why fonts that munge together many scripts are inherently a bad idea. But for independent fonts, why isn't it possible to simply make the ascent/descent/line-larger with respect to the EM square for Thai fonts than for Latin fonts? That is, a 10pt Latin font might have a line spacing of 13 points, while a 10pt Thai font could have a line spacing of 17 points. That shouldn't cause any clipping problems. Regards, Owen
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