Re: [DejaVu-fonts] Fwd: Re: including Chinese ideographs?

[Zhang W. <zha...@re...>]

> Le jeudi 21 juin 2007 à 13:06 -0400, Ed Trager a écrit :
> 
> > Please read my blog on "Why We Don't Really Need Pan-Unicode Fonts
> > Anymore" here:
> > 
> >    http://www.unifont.org/blogs/2006.03.01.html
> > 
> > ... which explains my position that it is best to create individual
> > fonts tailored to specific scripts and orthographies -- and then use
> > FontConfig to support "synthetic" pan-Unicode font sets (such as
> > "serif" or "sans") for general display purposes on the Free Desktop.
> 
> I can't agree with this.
> Fontconfig substitutions are a great failsafe. They're a disaster when
> fonts overlap (and every real-world font overlaps, at least in the
> punctuation/latin/symbol blocks). They are totally unacceptable for
> documents with strong layouting, because the substitution rules are not
> the same on every system. They are totally unacceptable for multilingual
> documents, unless every component of the synthetic font set has been
> carefully tested with the others to provide a coherent experience and
> not give any particular script a visual advantage (people are touchy
> about this kind of stuff).

I have read about the discussion of using fontconfig over having a big
collection of font. There have already been a lot of hot threads about
it. I always agree the later.

> 
> If you make the effort to find separate fonts that work well together,
> have no overlap, are sure to be installed together and be defined by a
> precise fontconfig synthetic alias on user systems you've done 90% of
> the effort required to create a pan-unicode font.
> 
> Except it won't work on anything but fontconfig apps. So what's the
> point of stopping there? People need to interact with windows users too.
> 
> Cyrillic and Greek are no closer to Latin than Hebrew. That they were
> done properly is a property of Cyrillic and Greek people working with
> Latin people, nothing more and nothing less. They used to be managed
> with totally different font sets, designed by different people in
> different foundries of different countries. Just like Asian scripts used
> to be managed with totally different font sets, and we're now seeing new
> unified fonts like the Vista ones.
> 
> It's true creating pan-script fonts is hard. It's true no script should
> ever added without careful design and review by native users of this
> script. That's still an organizational, not technical limit, and if you
> can get many localization groups to work together on the same apps
> there's no reason for many design groups not to work on the same font.
> 
> Pan-script fonts are not appearing because designers are hopelessly
> misguided and confused. They keep appearing because users demand them,
> so they get done despite the fact they're harder than local fonts. 

Agreed.