Re: Chinese font families

On 10/23/2014 12:01 AM, Phillips, Addison wrote:
>
>> Monospace is pretty straightforward: it would be a font in which all
>> characters are the same width. They can be serif, sans-serif, cursive, or
>> whatever, but they have to have a consistent advance width. For many East
>> Asian fonts, all letters belonging to the East Asian scripts are the same width,
>> however punctuation, Latin, and digits are often proportional. A monospace
>> font will not have proportional punctuation, Latin, or digits: all characters with
>> an advance width must have the same advance width. Monospace fonts are
>> typically used for coding and ASCII art.
>>
> [AP>]
>
> Monospace is not as straightforward as it looks. I agree about the definition.
> The problem is that there are few CJK fonts that are designed to fit that
> definition of monospace. Although *most* glyphs in a CJK font have the same
> advance width (to match the ideographic "grid"), others have exactly half a
> space or have proportional behavior. So my concern isn't that we can't
> identify what a monospace font is, but rather that most systems don't provide
> one at all in CJK (and many other scripts). Maybe that's okay and valid, though.

Probably the key thing here is that all the Latin is monospaced.
As Marti mentions, in the case of CJK, probably two monospaced
Latin letters make up an ideographic advance.

> I agree that we could do that. The question is: do Chinese typographers
> want/need a stylistic category that is distinct from serif/sans/cursive/fantasy?

That I don't know. I think we should fix Kai and see what comes up
in terms of requests from the community.

> And, even if we squeeze Chinese in, what happens with other languages
> like Arabic?

Same thing, I think. Wait and see what requests come up...

> While on some level I'm worried about creating a whole wildly varied
> zoo of generics (think counter styles), on another level squeezing
> everything together is kind of unlike what we normally look to do in
> the I18N space.

True, although if we want custom font groupings associated to a font-family
keyword, the @font-face rule can already provide that. =)

> Mapping onto existing generics is desirable or even required for backwards
> compatibility. But ideally designers would be able to use appropriate
> stylistic variations without regard for whether the distinction is
> important in a given single document or style sheet. If I want a Nastaliq
> style, I should be able to specify it directly and not hope that sans-serif
> will deliver it (and not Naskh). If the user's system has no generic
> "nastaliq", falling back then on an appropriate style like "serif" is
> better than ransom notes, tofu, or other squint-worthy behavior.

I think for practicality, we should limit the sources for generic families
to printed paragraphs and not calligraphic styles, titles, or signage.
There is a plethora of calligraphic styles in all writing systems,
particularly if we consider historic styles.

There's also a backwards-compatibility danger in that, if we add a new
generic, then any style sheets that previously sought a font of that
name will now seek the generic instead.

~fantasai

Received on Thursday, 23 October 2014 06:16:56 UTC