Re: glyph selection for Unicode in browsers

Hi,
I am glad to see the issue has been given some attention.
I concluded there was a problem after experimenting with some CJK
characters that I repeated with different lang tags and could not get
any display differences unless I used non-Unicode fonts assigned to each
language. I did this with IE 6 and NS 7 and Opera (dont recall if it was
6 or 7.)

tex


Jungshik Shin wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 26 Sep 2002, Tex Texin wrote:
> 
> > Yes, underlying fonts can be a Unicode architecture. That's a good
> > thing, but invisible to end-users.
> > I would like to keep the sense of "Unicode font" as meaning a font which
> > supports a large number of scripts, rather than meaning one that uses
> > Unicode for its mapping architecture.
> >
> > Yes, OS and browsers are getting better. My concerns center around:
> > Is the mechanism for selecting fallback fonts language-sensitive, so
> > that it would favor a Japanese font for Unicode Han characters that were
> > tagged as lang:ja
> 
>   I'm a little at loss as to why you have the impression
> that  'lang' tag has little effect on rendering of html (in
> UTF-8. e.g. your page or IUC10 announcement page which used to be at
> http://www.unicode.org/iuc/iuc10/x-utf8.html) by major browsers. MS
> IE has been making use of 'lang' attribute(html) for a long time and
> Mozilla solved the problem (although 'xml:lang' is not yet supported)
> last December. In case of Mozilla(and Netscape 7), see
> 
>   http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=105199  (fixed.
>    where you'll find a pair of screenshots with dramatically
>    different rendering results)
>   http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=115121
>       (xml:lang : not yet fixed)
>   http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=122779 (C-L http header
>      and  UTF-8 document)
> 
> > And are the fonts labeled so that the supported language is known?
> 
>   Judging from the discussion about the issue in Xfree86-font
> list, most of modern OTFs are. Otherwise, applications (or  a library
> for text rendering/font selection) can resort to a kind of mapping the
> character repertoire of a font to language(s) covered as is done by
> fontconfig for XFree86. For instance, characters in JIS X 0208 are all
> covered, but characters from GB2312, Big5 and KS X 1001 are missing,
> a font is likely to be Japanese.
> 
> > Even so, I'd still need to have a large collection of fonts then.
> 
>   Indeed that's the case. If OT lang-tag is made use of and
> multiple alternative glyphs are available in a single(or
> a few) pan-script Unicode font(s), you'd not have to.
> 
>   Jungshik

-- 
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Tex Texin   cell: +1 781 789 1898   mailto:Tex@XenCraft.com
Xen Master                          http://www.i18nGuy.com
                         
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Received on Friday, 27 September 2002 11:11:54 UTC