Re: Asian language fonts?

[Werner LEMBERG]

> > Can somebody tell me why every time somebody releases one of those
> > Asian fonts the western characters in those fonts (i.e. "a, b, c")
> > look so butt-ugly!?
> 
> I share your sentiments.
> 
> However, also remember the constraints that they have to work with.
> Those western glyphs are supposed to be monospaced.  The halfwidth
> ones must have a width exactly half of a Chinese glyphs, i.e. half a
> square.  Then, there are the fullwidth ones that have to fill a
> square exactly.  That is so that everything would align nicely on,
> say, a 80x24 or 80x25 text console or terminal window.

Another reason for having ugly-looking western characters in those
fonts is that they are simply not used for typography.  If you need
western characters, use a western font.  All major operating systems
act like this.  Having one big Unicode font without a sensible
mechanism like OpenType to select proper script support is nonsense
and makes only sense for simple console support.  And even here, I
believe that a bitmapped font serves much better.


    Werner