[XeTeX] On cross-language font selection

[Yin Dian]

Hi,

2007/2/14, Jjgod Jiang <gzjjgod at gmail.com>:
>
> Hi,
>
> 2007/2/14, Akira Kakuto <kakuto at fsci.fuk.kindai.ac.jp>:
> > Why don't you use the "same font" for Chinese and English?
> > (no glyph in the ascii range?)
> > It will be better from the point of view of design of fonts
> > not to change font if possible even in the mixed typesetting.
>
> Well, I believe the best thing in XeTeX is I can try and mix whatever
> font I wish. For myself, here are a few points:
>
> 1. Most latin characters in Chinese fonts are not very pleasant to
> look at.


Indeed. AFAIK the most commonly used latin fonts in Chinese documents in
correspondence to SongTi are Times and Computer Modern, not the ones shipped
with SongTi itself. Usually the latin characters displayed with SimSun are
of the same width, which is not desirable to bring out a good look.

2. It's impossible to find a font cover full UCS4 ranges.


That's the case. As is said on Microsoft's page,  one Opentype font can
contain no more than 65,536 fonts, while UCS4 contains more than 70,000
glyphs in CJK-ExtA and CJK-ExtB. It is said on the forum of pkucn that
CJK-ExtC also contains thousands of glyphs, not to mention CJK-ExtD in the
future. So a scheme for mapping different Unicode ranges to different font
is needed to generate pdf file against ttf/otf fonts. Otherwise we can only
use a bunch of *.pfb, as LaTeX+CJK does.

I don't know much about Omega, but the information I know suggests that it's
powerful in font manipulation. One can even use external OTP to include
dynamically created fonts that have not been included by Unihan, namely the
gaiji problem.

3. I can try different combinations to see which latin fonts fit the CJK
> font best typographically.
> 4. Normally I don't have the license to modify either the latin font or
> CJK font, I just have the license to use/embed them.
>
> - jjgod.
> _______________________________________________


Best regards!

-Dian YIN
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