Richard is amazing. I briefly worked with him while volunteering on a W3C text layout requirements document. He cares deeply about writing systems, and he has been doing so much valuable work in this space.
Are there any developments towards font file standards that support the theoretical full space of unicode? I've always heard that fonts are limited in size to a subset of the true space.
It's not a big problem in practice since you can split large character sets across multiple files and use multi-font support to combine them in the renderer.
The texts in the images claimed to be Simplified Chinese are not really conforming the standard glyph shapes of hanzi as defined by the government of China; they look more like the Japanese standard shapes of kanji.
Can you clarify which characters you're talking about? I don't see any examples of Japanese-specific kanji in the simplified Chinese examples.
For example, the first image uses 沟 and 时 forms that are found only in simplified Chinese. In both Japanese and traditional Chinese, these are written 溝 and 時.
The images also correctly use the Chinese forms of 統/统. The Japanese form [0] differs from both and does not appear in these images.
请 as shown in the image is similarly used only in simplified Chinese, not Japanese. In Japanese, the traditional Chinese form is normally used in handwriting, and an alternate form of the 訁 radical (different from either of the Chinese forms) is often used in printed text.
Thanks for your reply. I was wrong in that they are using the Japanese glyphs. The ones I've noticed are 次将及化等; I checked again and 次及化等 are actually Traditional Chinese glyphs, while 将 is Japanese glyph. It seems that these glyphs are a mix of multiple standards.
One of the big complaints about Han-unification in Unicode is that simplified and traditional forms share the same code points so display of simplified vs traditional is up to the font to manage.
That's not really accurate. An overwhelming majority of the simplified characters have had their own code points in Unicode ever since 1.0. Some more details here: https://r12a.github.io/scripts/chinese/
This site has been a gem for a long time for Unicode and language-related topics. Just as good to link to the top-level,
https://r12a.github.io/
Richard is amazing. I briefly worked with him while volunteering on a W3C text layout requirements document. He cares deeply about writing systems, and he has been doing so much valuable work in this space.
Are there any developments towards font file standards that support the theoretical full space of unicode? I've always heard that fonts are limited in size to a subset of the true space.
It's not a big problem in practice since you can split large character sets across multiple files and use multi-font support to combine them in the renderer.
Also: UTF-8 Playground: https://utf8-playground.netlify.app
The texts in the images claimed to be Simplified Chinese are not really conforming the standard glyph shapes of hanzi as defined by the government of China; they look more like the Japanese standard shapes of kanji.
Can you clarify which characters you're talking about? I don't see any examples of Japanese-specific kanji in the simplified Chinese examples.
For example, the first image uses 沟 and 时 forms that are found only in simplified Chinese. In both Japanese and traditional Chinese, these are written 溝 and 時.
The images also correctly use the Chinese forms of 統/统. The Japanese form [0] differs from both and does not appear in these images.
请 as shown in the image is similarly used only in simplified Chinese, not Japanese. In Japanese, the traditional Chinese form is normally used in handwriting, and an alternate form of the 訁 radical (different from either of the Chinese forms) is often used in printed text.
[0]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%B5%B1#Japanese
Thanks for your reply. I was wrong in that they are using the Japanese glyphs. The ones I've noticed are 次将及化等; I checked again and 次及化等 are actually Traditional Chinese glyphs, while 将 is Japanese glyph. It seems that these glyphs are a mix of multiple standards.
One of the big complaints about Han-unification in Unicode is that simplified and traditional forms share the same code points so display of simplified vs traditional is up to the font to manage.
That's not really accurate. An overwhelming majority of the simplified characters have had their own code points in Unicode ever since 1.0. Some more details here: https://r12a.github.io/scripts/chinese/
That’s good to know. I’ve heard the complaint offered many times, but don’t have the necessary language skills to know otherwise.