State of Text Rendering

State of Text Rendering

Posted Jul 15, 2009 18:30 UTC (Wed) by foom (subscriber, #14868)
In reply to: State of Text Rendering by anselm
Parent article: State of Text Rendering

Well, it's also difficult to mix together Chinese Japanese and Korean text, with different encodings pre Unicode.

With Unicode, at least you can clearly understand what the characters are, there's no ambiguity, and it's easy to process. However, in order to get optimal rendering, you do need to have a document which can specify a font for certain blocks of text. This hardly seems a problem in today's world -- how much software is there that can't deal with rich text, really?

Furthermore, the following quote from the referenced article:

For instance, the style called Mincho in Japan, Myeongjo in Korea, and Song in China originated in Ming-dynasty China and is universally acceptable in the CJK countries. The Japanese fontmaker Typebank has a Chinese Mincho font with PRC-simplified characters approved by the Chinese government that shares glyphs with their Japanese Mincho font, and it is quite feasible to make a Mincho font that will serve the mainland Chinese/Korean/Japanese users decently.

It sounds to me like the default font can be chosen to be neutral, and different fonts can be chosen as desired for optimal rendering of particular pieces of text. But even if you fail to do so, the text will be recognizable.

It seems to me that the most important thing is to make sure you have similar-looking fonts covering all the necessary characters, so you don't end up with a random mix of differing looking fallback fonts for different characters with no rhyme or reason...

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