[XeTeX] encoding radicals in traditional Chinese

[Benct Philip Jonsson]

On 2008-11-30 Daniel Greenhoe wrote:
> Could it be that some font designers just don't bother to 
> include glyphs for radicals that are not characters?
> 

Most probably.  A parallel case is when most fonts for
Devanagari don't include glyphs for complex conjuncts
(ligatures) which are not used in the modern languages
and may be rare even in Sanskrit.  However when you
need to write those Sanskrit words that use those
conjuncts you are stumbled.

FWIW the Han fonts standardly included in Ubuntu are
able to display the Kangxi radicals in range 2f00,
as well as at least all the equivalent chars in range
4e00-9fff which I randomly choose to check.

One should wish that someone with a better insight
wrote a Perl module for conversion between the 2f00
range and the 4e00 range as described in the document
Gerrit pointed too ( 
http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U2F00.pdf.
However my insights into CJK languages are limited
to the results of occasional forays into Chinese
and Japanese Buddhism in the context of studying
Indian and Tibetan Buddhism and a smattering of Japanese.
My insights into Perl are also limited to what I need
to complete some household chores working with
digitized texts and dictionary data in the fields
of more westerly/northerly languages.

Since they Windows 2k and XP and hence probably
Vista can use TTC fonts you should have no trouble
downloading the fonts mentioned above from here:

<http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/CJKUnifonts/Download/>

You may need to download something like WinRAR
<http://www.rarlab.com/download.htm> to unpack
the Tarballs.  The deb files are Debian/Ubuntu
installers of no use to you.  If you utterly
fail contact  me offlist and I'll repack them
as ZIP for you.

/BP 8^)>
-- 
Benct Philip Jonsson -- melroch atte melroch dotte se
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
  "C'est en vain que nos Josués littéraires crient
  à la langue de s'arrêter; les langues ni le soleil
  ne s'arrêtent plus. Le jour où elles se *fixent*,
  c'est qu'elles meurent."           (Victor Hugo)