Comments on: CTL/CJK format character previews

By: Caolán

Caolán — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 12:28:47 +0000

Probably would be nice to in the format->character dialog have another column which groups together fonts by the scripts they support, and/or some other natural shared features. Could have some sort of toggle in the drop-down font dialog to only show fonts which support the scripts currently used in the document or something of that nature. Not working on that myself though,

By: Milan Bouchet-Valat

Milan Bouchet-Valat — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 10:25:23 +0000

“some hugely over-engineered set of heuristics to guess the best script a font is tuned”
Do you think this could be used to hide fonts that are clearly not relevant to the scripts the user is currently typing in? It would be nice to hide all these Chinese, Arabic, etc. fonts that clutter the fonts menu on every Linux distribution (in Fedora, we have these Lohi fonts, plus a few Chinese at the end of the list). I guess the current script(s) can be chosen from the language of the document.

By: Caolán

Caolán — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 08:44:49 +0000

Sure, the three categories are effectively arbitrary and bizarre, but they’re not my categories. The problem with changing them is that ODF has the three categories built into it of LATIN, ASIAN, and COMPLEX. OpenXML has three, or four?, equally crazed categories built into it as well, where the division between categories is fuzzy and ill-defined. In LibreOffice/ODF its also really annoying that the fontsize and italic/bold is different between script categories as well, not just the fontname, which makes interoperability somewhat painful.

If I was starting from scratch I’d either not have different categories at all in the first place, or have different categories based on ISO-15924 and share fontsize/fontstyle settings between scripts.

By: Not Just Western, Asian and Complex: The World Has More Than Three Languages « Aharoni in Unicode, ya mama

Sun, 23 Oct 2011 10:50:28 +0000

[...] with Ophira Gamliel; and Lior Kaplan‘s and Caolán McNamara‘s questions about the font selection dialog in LibreOffice. Thank you, Santhosh, Ophira, Lior and Caolán for making me finally write this post, which i [...]

By: Not Just Western, Asian and Complex: The World Has More Than Three Languages « Aharoni in Unicode, ya mama

Sun, 23 Oct 2011 10:50:28 +0000

By: The World Has More Than Three Languages « Aharoni in Unicode, ya mama

The World Has More Than Three Languages « Aharoni in Unicode, ya mama — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 09:28:59 +0000

By: Amir E. Aharoni

Amir E. Aharoni — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 17:49:49 +0000

It’s not directly related to the issue you discuss here, but while you’re at it, consider putting an end to the preposterous practice of dividing all the world’s languages into “Western”, “CJK” and “CTL”. First of all, most people don’t know what “CTL” and “CJK” are–even the people who write in the so-called “complex” languages.

Much more importantly, these labels are over-generic, badly outdated and just plain wrong. Hebrew and Malayalam are both “complex” according to this division, but they are complex for entirely different reasons and they are usually written using different fonts. However, they may be used in one document, and even in one sentence. Believe it or not, right now i am reading–and making little edits to–such a document myself: it is a grammar book of the Malayalam language written for Hebrew-speaking students, and it uses “western fonts” for phonetic transcription of Malayalam words. There’s no easy way to specify styles for this document and it drives me and its author nuts. There are more documents of this kind than many “western” people might think.

This dialog should not be oriented to outdated concepts like “CTL” and “Western”, but to languages and scripts. Looking at ISO 15924, ISO 639 and the IANA Language subtag registry is the right way to start with this.

There is a reasonable way to implement this without giving the users a very long list of languages, but since this comment is getting too long and since this problem pestered me since about 1997, i am going to write a post in my own blog about it.

By: Elad Alfassa

Elad Alfassa — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 10:07:39 +0000

Err, seems that your WordPress installation changes every Hebrew character I right into question marks.

By: Elad Alfassa

Elad Alfassa — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 09:54:26 +0000

The Nikud of ??? ??? ???? seems to be rendered incorrectly. the Kamatz (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamatz) should be under the Alef, not under the right side of it.