Re: Chinese font families

Hi Elika,

more comments.

Bobby

> Phillips, Addison <addison@lab126.com> 於 2014年10月22日 下午9:01 寫道：
> 
> Hi Elika,
> 
> Some comments follow.
> 
> Addison
> 
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: fantasai [mailto:fantasai.lists@inkedblade.net]
>> Sent: Wednesday, October 22, 2014 5:25 PM
>> To: public-i18n-core@w3.org
>> Subject: Re: Chinese font families
>> 
>> 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.

Most of CJK fonts are fixed width in ideographic parts, only a few of them are proportional [1]. Windows provides two system fonts: PMingliu and Mingliu. PMingliu's latin parts are proportional and Mingliu's are monospace. That will fit the definition.

>>> For the second problem, while it is common to associate fonts like
>>> Song with the serif style or Gothic with the sans-serif style, this
>>> leaves some stylistic variations that do not have exact associations
>>> out in the cold. For example, one site lists these styles for Chinese
>>> (I do not vouch for the accuracy/completeness):
>>> 
>>> "sans-serif" - such as Hei; system provided "sans-serif" font on many
>>> platforms "serif" - such as Ming/Song/Sung, etc.; system provided
>>> "serif" font on many platforms "regular script" - such as Kai; more
>>> calligraphic, second most common print style after Ming/Song
>>> "semi-cursive" - such as Xing; somewhere in between Kai and Cao "grass
>>> script" - such as Cao; free-flowing cursive "clerical script"  - such
>>> as Li; old-fashioned but colorful and still pretty widely used "seal
>>> script" - used on seals, not widely used for longer text but sometimes
>>> used for visual effect
>> 
>> I'm unsure about the last two (I'd probably put clerical script in the same
>> bucket as blackletter and Kufi), but I think Kai, Xing, and Cao would all fall
>> under 'cursive'. For Latin, for example, cursive spans from Monotype Corsiva
>> through the Zaner and Carpenter Script families, i.e. varying levels of
>> cursiveness.
> [AP>] 
> 
> 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? And, even if we squeeze Chinese in, what happens with other languages like Arabic? 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.

Kai, Xing and Cao in common: they are typefaces written by ink brush. So think they should be associated together. And the usage of Kai in print is just almost same as Gothic(sans-serif) in Japanese. 

And about semi-cursive. In Chinese, a frequently used typeface called FangSongti (In Japan, called Sochotai). We've discussed how to fit this typeface into the spec. Japanese typographers think it should be italic to serif font, since ideographic should not to be forced oblique. It can be done by @font-face. But about 'italic' might be arranged to "if assigned font-family do not contain real italic stylem do not force characters oblique." 


[1]: monotype's works like MLingWaiPHK-Light and MBanguetPHK-Medium 
http://www.monotype.com.hk/download/sample_PDF/OpenType_166_fontlist.pdf

Received on Thursday, 23 October 2014 06:45:17 UTC