Re: [Groff] Re: groff: radical re-implementation

[Tomohiro KUBOTA]

Hi,

At Thu, 19 Oct 2000 22:15:02 +0200 (CEST),
Werner LEMBERG <address@hidden> wrote:

> The same exists for Japanese and Chinese, especially for vertical
> writing.

I think *ideograms* have fixed width everywhere.  Of course CJK languages
have their own non-letter symbols which sometimes don't have fixed width.
(In Japanese, non-letter symbols have the fixed width unless two 
non-letter symbols continue.  This applies for both horizonal and
vertical writing.)

Hiraganas and Katakanas are...
I like fixed width, though 'MS P mincho' and 'MS P gothic' fonts
(included in Japanese version of MS Windows) have non-fixed
width. (I don't want to call it 'proportional' because they don't
have good proportion at all for my sense of beauty.)

Note that different font have to be used for horizonal and vertical
writing.  However, you said you won't support vertical, didn't you?


# for people don't know about CJK (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean)
# languages:
# CJK people use ideograms which is called Hanji, Kanji, or Hanja.
# Though they have the same origin, they developed in different way
# in these countries.  In Unicode these ideograms are unified
# and this unification sometimes causes a trouble which Werner pointed
# before.
# Japanese people also use two sets of syllablic letters called Hiragana
# and Katakana.  Korean people also use a set of syllablic letters called
# Hangul.  Chinese people use ideograms only.  Of course CJK people
# use non-letter symbols like parentheses and so on.

Thus we can avoid the worst case to have glyph metrics for all
ideograms.

Hanguls, Hiraganas, Katakanas, ideograms, and almost CJK characters
have 'doublewidth' on tty, except for 'halfwidth' characters.  
'Fullwidth forms' characters also have 'doublewidth' on tty.  Thus 
it is easy to implement a font file for tty using glyph metric classes.

---
Tomohiro KUBOTA <address@hidden>
http://surfchem0.riken.go.jp/~kubota/