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>]

Abel Cheung wrote:


> That means, font change depending on context is actually preferrred in
> some fonts or some langauges, is it? If that's true, then this would be
> a per-language preference, some want it, some don't.

If anything probably more like an individual user preference - and even then
those users might want it to apply to some fonts and not others.

> So does pango support toggling this behavior yet? (I guess not?) And if
> not, would it be planned in future release?

If Pango allows you to toggle the behaviour on/off, applications using Pango
would still need to have an interface which enabled the user to do this.

Even where such an interface is available most users are going to be unaware of
which fonts on their system are using which features - and which features in a
font are on by default and which are user selectable (discretionary).

While an interface for selecting discretionary OpenType features might be
expected in specialised applications like desktop publishing / page layout
software, in other applications the overhead might not be considered worthwhile.

Language specific rendering *can* be achieved using OpenType lookups - but, even
if the font contains the necessary language specific lookups (and most don't),
for this feature to function correctly the system somehow needs to know which
language is being used. This cannot always be determined by current locale, the
keyboard/IME used to type the text, or from the range of Unicode characters
involved so especially with multilingual documents you need users to reliably
mark up text. Language then needs to be indicated by some high-level form of
mark-up or tagging within the documents - which right away excludes plain text.


- Chris