Re: On CJK font selection (was Re: [Fwd: Re: Request for review and advice on wqy-bitmap-fonts fontconfig settings])

[Christopher Fynn <cfynn gmx net>]

Sergey Udaltsov wrote:

> So there are two options here:
> 1. Introduce the concept of the language context into X and XKB. So
> apps would be able to distinguish 'group us used for English' and
> 'group us used for Romanian'. The group switching would take languages
> into account.

This makes sense. In MS Windows users can assign any keyboard (or multiple
keyboards) to any Input Language - and a single keyboard may be assigned to
multiple Input Languages. If this is done, and the appropriate language is
selected, it enables applications to pick up the current input language and use
it e.g. to tag text, apply appropriate spelling rules or display language
specific glyph variants.

Most of the time this works well - but a limitation in MS Windows is that it 
only allows users to assign a keyboard to a language MS officially support - so 
on MS Windows where Dzongkha is not supported I have to assign a Dzongkha 
keyboard to a supported language I'm not otherwise using like "Icelandic" (as 
Dzongkha is not included in their supported languages).  This causes problems in 
some applications like MS Office which then thinks my Dzongkha text is Icelandic 
(even though the sub-set of characters being used is entirely different). 
Fortunately OpenOffice under Windows is not so brain dead - I can tell it the 
text is Dzongkha even though the keyboard I'm using is assigned to "Icelandic".

In the case of CJK a user might assign the same IME to both Japanese and Chinese 
- if text was typed with the IME assigned to Japanese a font with Japanese style 
glyphs could be prioritised; and if the IME assigned to Chinese was selected a 
font with Chinese style glyphs could be prioritised. Or you could have one OT 
font with both sets of glyphs and have the layout engine display the language 
specific glyph variants based on the current input language and lookups in the 
font under the OpenType language system tag.


- Chris

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