Re: japanese vs. chinese fonts

[Werner LEMBERG]

> The debian description also says:
> 
>     This font provides full coverage of GBK (CP936) charset, CJK
>     Unified Ideographs, as well as the code-points needed for zh_CN,
>     zh_SG, zh_TW, zh_HK, zh_MO, ja (Japanese) and ko (Korean)
>     locales for fontconfig.

Hmm.  Does this font also provides proper `localized' glyphs, this is,
you select an OpenType language tag so that you get proper glyph
shapes?  They can vary considerably (and this is what Miles
disturbes).  Without this, the font shouldn't announce itself as
covering more than a single CJK *language*.

Ken Lunde, the leading CJK expert of Adobe, wrote a few years ago an
article regarding CJK glyph shapes (for a Unicode conference).  He
estimates that about a third of all CJK glyphs (this means
approx. 20000 characters!) need localized forms.

An additional complication is ideographic variation (this is something
on the character level, thus relevant to editors like Emacs), cf.

  http://unicode.org/reports/tr37/


    Werner