Re: CJK Letters some questions so I can compute font family sizes.

Hi Christophe,

Thanks again for a detailed and well researched response. There is a wealth
of information here.

Wayne, as you are continuing your measurement calculations, have you also
taken into account Ruby content (https://www.w3.org/TR/ruby/)? I'm not sure
how this will impact your experiments, but it strikes me there *may* be an
issue, or at a minimum, the need for some kind of exception to address Ruby
text, which by design is intended to be smaller than the "base font".

<ruby>
  <rb>WWW</rb>
  <rt>World Wide Web</rt>
</ruby>

*Figure 1.4*: Example of simple ruby markup

This may be rendered as follows:

[image: At the bottom left, three large letters reading 'WWW'. On top of
them, in smaller letters, the text 'World Wide Web'. To the right, arrows
and text saying 'ruby base' (bottom) and 'ruby text' (top).]

*Figure 1.5*: Example of rendering for simple ruby markup in Figure 1.4
<https://www.w3.org/TR/ruby/#fig1.4>
​(source: https://www.w3.org/TR/ruby/#simple-ruby1)

JF




On Thu, Jun 1, 2017 at 11:50 AM, Christophe Strobbe <
strobbe@hdm-stuttgart.de> wrote:

> Hi Wayne,
>
> I'll just cover Chinese. Each Chinese character "fills" a square of the
> same size, regardless how complex it is. ("Same size" obviously varies with
> font size.)
> As far as I know, the characters don't change depending on text
> orientation, i.e. left-to-right versus top-to-bottom.
> Fonts for Chinese can vary a bit in how much they look like characters
> written with a brush. For example, compare the fonts "DF Fang Song", "DF
> Kai Sho" and "DF Ming" (for traditional Chinese characters) on the page
> <http://pinyin.info/news/2011/taoyuan-international-airport-
> to-adopt-new-style-for-signs/>
> <http://pinyin.info/news/2011/taoyuan-international-airport-to-adopt-new-style-for-signs/>:
> the font "DF Kai Sho" looks most "brush-like". The samples represent the
> three most common font types for Chinese: Ming ("Mincho" in Japanese), Kai
> and Fang Song. (See also the font sample at <http://birdtrack.com/
> TypSampB.pdf> <http://birdtrack.com/TypSampB.pdf>.) There are other types
> of fonts, but the complexity of Chinese characters (compared to alphabets
> such as Latin) and the requirement of legibility limit what you can do. For
> example, there are no italics (or italics cause the characters to be
> rendered as oblique). Even a bold font weight can make characters hard to
> read.  That doesn't mean you can't have fancy Chinese fonts (see e.g. the
> samples at <https://chinesefontdesign.com/tag/simplified-chinese-font>
> <https://chinesefontdesign.com/tag/simplified-chinese-font>) but you
> wouldn't use these for "normal" text.
> The "one square per character" rule also applies to punctuation, except
> for the middle dot used to separate parts of a non-Chinese name (e.g.
> 列奥纳多‧达‧芬奇, a Chinese transcription of "Leonardo da Vinci"). These
> punctuation marks are therefore known as "fullwidth punctuation", as
> opposed to the "halfwidth punctuation" used in text in the Latin alphabet.
>
> As far as I know, the "one square per character" rule also applies to
> Japanese kanji, hiragana and katakana (in spite of the fact that kana are
> much simpler than most kanji). (Japanese also has half-width kana from the
> early days of Japanese computing, but it seems that they are today only
> used in specific settings - according to Wikipedia:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-width_kana.)
>
> Best regards,
>
> Christophe Strobbe
>
>
>
> On 31/05/2017 22:50, Wayne Dick wrote:
>
> These are some basic questions about CJK characters.
>
> Are they square?
> Does it matter if we measure width or height?
> Specifically,  will lr layout give the same letter spacing as vertical-rl?
> What are the unicode-8 code sequences for visible characters in: Chinese,
> Korean and Japanese?
> Does font family vary as much in these languages as in Latin languages?
> Wayne
>
>
> --
> Christophe Strobbe
> Akademischer Mitarbeiter
> Responsive Media Experience Research Group (REMEX)
> Hochschule der Medien
> Nobelstraße 10
> 70569 Stuttgart
> Tel. +49 711 8923 2749 <+49%20711%2089232749>
>
> “I drink tea and I know things.”
> Falsely attributed to Christophe Lannister.
>
>


-- 
John Foliot
Principal Accessibility Strategist
Deque Systems Inc.
john.foliot@deque.com

Advancing the mission of digital accessibility and inclusion