Re: [gtk-i18n-list] Re: On CJK font selection (was Re: [Fwd: Re: Request for review and advice on wqy-bitmap-fonts fontconfig settings])

[Behdad Esfahbod <behdad behdad org>]

On Fri, 2007-12-21 at 09:50 +0100, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> Le jeudi 20 décembre 2007 à 17:54 -0500, Behdad Esfahbod a écrit :
> 
> > That may help when typing, but has the following problems:
> > 
> >   - Fonts change when you switch language.
> 
> Fonts will change anyway (indeed the alpha and omega of current
> complains is they change but people disagree with the heuristics), and
> it's better to let users in control when we can not guess properly in a
> large number of cases

Guess I wasn't clear.  Fonts change on the current line as you switch
keyboard/IM.  So, you rotate through Chinese and English locales and
fonts keep changing with your change.  Unless you add markup to keep
state...


> >   - To make it meaningful, your editor should store the language at the
> > time of typing as a tag.  Or it will lose it and void the advantage.
> 
> Understood. I won't happen overnight. Nevertheless if can still happen
> faster than finding the perfect crystal ball.
> 
> >   - Doesn't help when copy/pasting or opening a document.
> 
> Cut & paste can probably be solved with a "tagged text" media type.
> Opening a document will never work for document types that do not store
> language info. But if the problem can be reduced to this perimeter we'll
> have made a huge leap forward.
> 
> > What will be helpful is, if pango could query your session and see that
> > you have American English and Chinese Chinese IM/layouts set, so
> > automatically set PANGO_LANGUAGE to en_US:zh_CN.  That is, respect your
> > set languages, but not necessarily follow the currently-selected one.
> 
> To me that is an if(CJK) solution. That is to say it sort of solves the
> problem of one group of users without being generalisable to other
> groups of users. It assumes you can deduce language from configured IMs,
> when those can overlap, when many languages can and are commonly typed
> through IMs primarily designed for another language, etc

Again, guess I wasn't clear.  I'm saying that if and when the desktop
has the language information (as opposed to just keyboard layout
information), Pango should use the list of all languages in that way.
This helps for example preferring Persian fonts over Arabic fonts.


> The breakage when the wrong language is detected is far more widespread
> than just chinese, even if the effects are often more subtle. You need
> good language detection to autoselect the right spellchecker, to tell
> office suite what language should tag a run of text, to select the right
> locl font alternative, etc including when users type several languages
> sharing the same unicode blocks. You'll never autodetect those through
> locales, IMs, or codepoints used. German people write English. Balkan
> people write Russian. They still use their primary IM for this since it
> gives them access to the codepoints needed without needing to learn
> another layout.
> 
-- 
behdad
http://behdad.org/

...very few phenomena can pull someone out of Deep Hack Mode, with two
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being struck by lightning.  -- Matt Welsh