Fonts (was Re: [etoys-dev] Wording in Clouds)

[Yoshiki Ohshima]

At Mon, 3 Aug 2009 19:20:45 -0700,
Edward Cherlin wrote:
> 
> >  Mine is rendering and retransmitting Japanese mixed with Hangul
> > correctly in ISO-2022-JP-2 (defined in RFC 1554 and supports mixed
> > Japanese and Chinese text nicely).  As Bert wrote, if you are reading
> > it through the forums gateway, that may be the problem.
> 
> Can you send to this list in Unicode? A lot of software doesn't
> support ISO-2022-JP correctly in any form. It is a large and complex
> standard, almost never implemented in full.

  There are a fewer software that supports ISO-2022-JP-2 for various
reasons, but it is still a member of ISO-2022 family, which a
reasonable emailer should support.  And, because vast majority of
(pretty much "virtually all") email traffic in Japan use ISO-2022-JP
(which is the standard anyway); so I'd send emails with some Japanese
characters in ISO-2022-JP.  Anybody who wants to communicate in email
in Japanese should use an emailer that supports ISO-2022-JP.  And
anybody who wants to talk about the glyph differences in Japanese and
Korean (if "plain text" is preferred) would get better results with an
emailer that supports ISO-2022-JP-2.

> How widely is ISO-2022-JP-2 implemented? I have never heard of it
> before. Certainly Firefox does not support it separately from
> ISO-2022-JP.

  It doesn't have to be separated entry for ISO-2022-JP and
ISO-2022-JP-2.  If you save my email as it is to a file, open the file
with Firefox by specifying file://... and change the encoding to
ISO-2022-JP, Firefox certainly display it correctly.

> > But you know that there is discrepancy between
> > Unicode claim and practice.  Like the round-trip conversion guarantee,
> > when the Unicode consortium cannot provide a standard mapping table and
> > the claim is false.
> 
> The round-trip conversion guarantee does not include all prior
> standards. There is a list. You would have to provide specifics (which
> we could better discuss offline) for me to comment on the details.

  Hmm.  JIS X 0208 was the national standard and predates Unicode.

> >  But anyway, the discussion here is whether you can tell the
> > languages supported by a font by looking at its name or not.  And
> > answer is no.
> 
> True for Windows. I blame Microsoft.

  "Deja-Vu" is French; the answer to the original question is no and
Blaming Microsoft doesn't help there.

-- Yoshiki