New Chinese fonts in Snow Leopard

[TenThousandThings]

I've begun the Chinese Mac site update for Snow Leopard, beginning
with the Fonts page:

http://www.yale.edu/chinesemac/pages/fonts.html#Apple

It's a first draft so probably a little confusing, and I need to try
to determine exactly what Extension B characters have been included in
the new Heiti SC/TC font. Is it just HKSCS, or are there more? Has
anyone else looked at this?

The other, Hiragino, font appears to be more straightforward, but also
needs to be looked at carefully. I assume it applies Japanese
typographic norms to the whole GB 18030 character set.

It will be a while before I can get to the full 10.6 page. There are
significant changes to the Pinyin input methods as well.

ER

[Tom Gewecke]

I came across this font issue in the Apple SL forums. Don't know
whether it is something that should be added to the FAQ.

http://zonble.github.com/tcfail/en.html

[TenThousandThings]

There are two unrelated problems here. The first is that the choices
are not consistent. If you're going to use 靑 for 青 as a component then
you have to use it consistently throughout the font, which is not done
and absolutely wrong. The second problem is actually rather
interesting -- using 靑 is not wrong, it is instead dated. For example,
the influential Far East C-E dictionary, originally compiled by Liang
Shiqiu 梁實秋 (1903-1987) uses it throughout. In the more recent editions
of the dictionary that give both simplified and traditional forms, 靑
is used for traditional forms while 青 is used for simplified. [I don't
know why Unicode needed to encode both variants, but it certainly
makes this e-mail easier to write!]

Anyhow, IMHO, the point that Weizhong should be making is that using 靑
is dated and Traditional Chinese is not a static, dead language -- it
is alive and today 青 is the proper and most common variant to use in
Taiwan and Hong Kong. The implication that it has anything to do with
Japan is wrong -- Liang Shiqiu was a celebrated scholar in China long
before he fled to Taiwan during the Civil War. The same usage of 靑 is
found in the Mathews dictionary, first published in Shanghai in 1931.
When Weizhiong says "Some glyphs seem coming from the Japanese Kanjis,
or some ancient alternative forms no longer popular today," the first
suggestion is dead wrong and the second implies that 靑 hasn't been
used since ancient times, which is also wrong.

Regardless, I believe Apple can easily fix the first problem
(consistency) by reassigning the glyph variants for those code points
within Heiti TC. For example, there are three glyphs available for 請
-- see GID #s 25608, 25609, and 25610. [In the Character Viewer, go to
Glyph > Font: Heiti TC.] As for the second issue, I would like to see
Apple break this into three TC fonts: an old-school font that follows
the pre-war norms and uses 25609, a formal sort of current TC font
that uses 25610, and a completely up-to-date TC font that uses 25608.
Either of the last two would work as a system font, but I agree with
Weizhong that the last one is what people expect and want, and it's
Apple's job to know that.

ER

[TenThousandThings]

I wrote that response very quickly yesterday before going out, so it
wasn't as diplomatic as it should have been. For example, I'm not
really sure Weizhong's suggestion about Japanese kanji is "dead wrong"
-- it is certainly wrong with regard to the use of 靑 as a component,
but there may be other cases I'm not aware of.

Also, allow me to reformulate my suggestion about how to address the
second issue. It's probably not helpful to suggest Apple thinks TC is
a "dead language." It is enough to simply assert that 靑 is a common
pre-war printed form that was used for books in Taiwan and Hong Kong
as late as the 1960s and 70s but (someone correct me if I'm wrong) is
not seen much in TC publishing today except in an ornamental way, like
on the covers of books. Using it in a system font, which should
conform to current usage, is not correct and needs to be changed.

So Apple just needs to go through Heiti TC and reassign any glyphs
that don't follow the norms adopted for LiHei Pro. Then they need to
generate at least one other font from the collection, one that should
be called something like "Heiti TC Oldstyle" and would adopt pre-war
printing standards. I mean, all the glyphs are already there in the
font collection. Why not use them?

It's great that Apple is leading the way when it comes to the use of
glyph variants. Let's not lose sight of that. Some confusion and
mistakes are par for the course.

Eric