Tex Texin scripsit: > I do need to point out that user preference is problematic if it means > that for a user to display a multilingual document, the user has to go > thru and specify font preferences for languages they know nothing about.
How can this be avoided? If I print a document containing a small amount of text in Georgian (in a bibliography entry, say), I am not going to know if the Georgian font is the most beautiful thing ever made or one that is utterly illegible. I have to pass it to someone who can read Georgian and wait for the "Aah!" or "Arrgh!" as the case may be. Or I can take the default and hope for the best. > Just because I don't read CJK, doesn't mean I don't have legitimate > needs to display or print CJK in a typographically correct way. > Librarians, Commerce exchanges, mailing lists, localizers, etc. Since the issue is not really a matter of language, but of typographic tradition (see John Jenkins's excellent discussion of this question at http://www.unicode.org/unicode/faq/han_cjk.html#3), there is no such thing as a "typographically correct way". In particular (as noted in the FAQ), it is commonplace for a Japanese document that quotes Chinese text to use Japanese-style glyphs for both languages, as this is apparently less jarring to the average Japanese reader. > But although you didn't quite say this, a user could provide a > preference not for font, but language, i.e. if the script is CJK, > display it as C or J or K (or T). And given the language the font > mechanisms would do a reasonable thing. That is reasonable provided you grasp what is meant by "language preference" here: namely, typographical tradition preference. It would be like choosing between Fraktur and Antiqua when reading German text: this too is rather broader than a mere font difference. -- A mosquito cried out in his pain, John Cowan "A chemist has poisoned my brain!" http://www.ccil.org/~cowan The cause of his sorrow http://www.reutershealth.com Was para-dichloro- [EMAIL PROTECTED] Diphenyltrichloroethane. (aka DDT)
