1. Re: about the far fatter fonts
Hi Colin (and others),
Just a quick note here about the layout strategy for the bigger font-set.
First, attempts to tie anything in to Unicode will run into problems down
the road. There is no set standard, like most of us are led to believe.
This in one enormous problem. Another is that, astoundingly, no one on the
Unicode founding committee even bothered to consult with the Chinese (both
on the Mainland and their bitter counterparts, the Taiwanese and other
Overseas Chinese), the Japanese, or the Koreans (both North or South,
again, bitter rivals who do not recognize any intercoursal attempts at
connectivity, let alone the efforts of a foreign 'governing body'. This is
a much bigger problem that has since then refused to go away: the Japanese
do not want to use characters from the same pool as the Chinese and the
Koreans, the Mainland Chinese likewise, the Overseas Chinese likewise, the
Koreans likewise. It is one big political mess!
So that is to be avoided at all cost. Any attempt to qualify the sets to a
common pool (like in Unicode) will hit a really rocky road. There is a
great amount of actual pride involved here with these peoples, and I don't
really blame them about it. The way around this is to just extend the
capability of the font program to handle up to 65 grand and then not worry
about where the characters go in it.
The main usage (in my case... other users will be different) is to be able
to typeset and print out whatever I have worked on. Again simpler is
better here. Do not think of these Han (Chinese characters; Kanji in
Japanese; Hangul in Korean) ideographs as letters of the alphabet, like we
are trained to use things. That will also take care of itself if left
simple. Right to left, up and down, are very desirable, and not too tough
to do, as you say.
I am also using you older .sf font program in my work. It works great for
things that the standard set of Font.e does not do. There is a major
memory leak in the Include bm_expand global function that does show up
after running my program for about ten minutes, crashing the whole thing
with a memory overrun. Also, the font editor will not show the 32nd
character (hex 20) when I am using a 32X32 size. Other than than
everything else in it works great!
sorry this is so hurried. I will post some more on this later after lunch
(Pacific Standard Time)
Gratefull
Norm
