Re: [gtk-i18n-list] Unicode PUA supporting issue in gtk+/pango

[Abel Cheung <abelcheung gmail com>]

On 12/24/05, Chia-I Wu <b90201047 ntu edu tw> wrote:
> > Nothing to say, even if the charset/mapping
> > table of new HKSCS is published, the release of the font for
> > new HKSCS will be delayed (especially high-quality scalable
> > fonts). Therefore, even if we ignore the possibility that
> > some fonts have all characters of HKSCS-2001 and a part of
> > HKSCS-2004, we have to use HKSCS-2001 mapping table for the
> > font that is compliant to HKSCS-2001 and not to HKSCS-2004.
> > If we use HKSCS-2004 mapping table and HKSCS-2001 fonts,
> > some PUA codepoints are mapped to undisplayable public codepoints,
> > coversion scripts generate undisplayable string. Therefore,
> > I think, still we have to care which standards the font is
> > compliant...?
> Yes, of course.  Let's quote some vendor's description of its product:
>
>         All the fonts are  in Unicode encoding standard and supports the
>         Hong Kong SAR Government's Chinese Common Interface and latest
>         version of Hong Kong Supplementary Characters Set (HKSCS-2001).
>
> You never want to upgrade your system to HKSCS-2004 unless some or all
> of your fonts have been upgraded to support HKSCS-2004.

This is the story for COMMERCIAL fonts, which are not used in any
open platforms. About open source side, Arne's font has all HKSCS-2004
glyphs ready, and is currently bundled in almost all Linux distributions
(as well as shipped by default in the future). The status for other Unices
are unknown for now.


> > Interesting. Could you tell me the framework to use the font
> > in Taiwan?
> Well, if the font comes with big5 cmap (platform 3, encoding 4), and you
> use it, not the unicode one, to look up glyph index, then you can use it
> in Taiwan.  But this is just in theory.  I don't know if there are HKSCS
> fonts having such cmap nor if it really works :)

Arphic fonts don't have big5 cmap (at least according to ftdump).
Also search fonts from a few commercial vendors, still can't find
any so far.

Abel


>
> pango can not do this because it uses unicode cmap to look up glyph
> index.
>
> --
> Regards,
> olv
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>


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Abel Cheung   (GPG Key: 0xC67186FF)
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