Update of bug #62830 (project groff): Status: Postponed => Need Info
_______________________________________________________ Follow-up Comment #9: Quoting Oliver Corff from the mailing list post cited in comment #7: I had a look at https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?62830 and Tanaka Takuji mentions the work of UKAI Fumitoshi et al., defining M for Japanese Mincho and G for Japanese Gothic style. While Mincho and Gothic loosely compare to serif and sans serif styles (let's say, Times Roman and Helvetica for the first idea), the problem with those Japanese fonts which are publicly available or free (as in free to use) is that they are heavily leaning towards Japanese usage of the CJK character set. Many of these fonts are derived from earlier work which covered only Japanese and still do not fully cover the CJK Unified Character set. I attached three screenshots of my character map, showing the region where the characters grouped under the radical 人 (rén, "(hu)man") are assembled. IPAMincho is visibly defective in its coverage, the bold sans serif characters are substituted from the Droid Sans font. WenQuanYi_Zen_Hei is a Chinese-Made sans serif CJK Unified Ideograph font which covers everything but is a good approximation to "Gothic" typeface, and ZYSong18030 is the same in Serif-style. This unintentional mixup of character representations from different fonts, until recently, was a headache when writing e.g. presentations for a PR China audience using Microsoft's PowerPoint. At least on machines until Windows 7 (don't know the current state) an out-of-the-box slide full of Chinese text would show a horrible mix of typeface because the "CJK" preset of the OS and of the Office software suite used to be a Mincho variant, with the result that many frequent CJK characters which are only used in Mainland China were displayed in a different style. Setting the document default East Asian font to something different would solve the problem. A word on names: The Japanese loanword "gothic" corresponds to what is historically known as "blackletter". The Chinese term for this is simply a translation: "hei" (black), as in "heiti" ("ti", pronounced "tee", stands for "body"). The "serif" equivalent Mincho name implies the Ming Dynasty, however the more common usage in China is Song (who were two centuries before the Ming), universally known for their cultural refinement, also expressed in calligraphy and typeface. Ming (or Japanese "Mincho", "-cho" [long vowel] simply means "dynasty") in Japan or Song (in China) is the most commonly used typeface for books, serious newspapers etc. So I think the font family classification terminology should be language-agnostic (i.e., avoiding terms like "Mincho" or "heiti" because fonts explicitely labelled as such might be designed for the needs of one particular language only (e.g., Chinese (traditional or simplified?), Japanese (even here: old style vs. new style), Korean), and by design, might be severely limited for any CJK display outside that language. Visible and fundamental differences between different CJK presentations are shown on the Wikipedia page "List of CJK fonts": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CJK_fonts Figure 1 shows the differences between different typeface styles (NOT language-specific), while figure 2 shows the graphematical differences of the same characters in different languages. Notable are columns 1 and 3. NB: This image is not composed of characters taken from a font but was created as a SVG file. Please note that CJK Unified Ideographs contain most but not all of the language-specific differences in stroke order etc. So, for demanding typographical work one will always use a font which is specifically designed to match a certain style. For the vast majority of generic text in modern everyday life (be the genre sciences, humanities, non-fiction, fiction, newspapers) it is possible to use a single pan CJK font to cover several CJK languages; think of a Japanese text book for Chinese learners, of a Chinese-Japanese dictionary, of a Japanese analysis of a Chinese newspaper article with portions of original text in quotes. Yet, there are exceptional situations where the usage of a generic CJK font is such a no-go that it has the potential to create a diplomatic incident; simply because minutiae in stroke order have a high impact on the (language/national) identity perception of the reader. Unfortunately, I cannot say for certain what a typical standard font in a typical off-the-shelf Japanese Linux version is. I'll have to download a representative version and run it, at least in a virtual machine or from a USB live stick, but I'll certainly explore that and share my findings. It would be helpful to me if Messrs. Tanaka and Corff could reach a consensus on a schema for naming CJK font families. :) _______________________________________________________ Reply to this item at: <https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?62830> _______________________________________________ Message sent via Savannah https://savannah.gnu.org/