Asciidoctor :: Discussion

Re: How to generate fonts

Posted by mojavelinux on
URL: https://discuss.asciidoctor.org/How-to-generate-fonts-tp2358p2650.html

Rei,

On Fri, Jan 2, 2015 at 1:34 AM, chloerei [via Asciidoctor :: Discussion] <[hidden email]> wrote:
I checked location 0x91cf in NotoSans CJK, it's not the right '量' glyph. And checked same location in DroidSansFallback, it's right glyph.

But when I open NotoSans CJK in KDE's font viewer, enter example text '变量'(means 'variable'), it shows the right glyph. I don't understand the mechanism.

Thanks for verifying. So my intuition was correct, FontForge is messing up the mapping somehow.

I can understand why it might be messing up, just not exactly why. As I understand it, there is an effort to reduce the size of CJK fonts by reusing glyphs or parts of glyphs. This is a feature of OpenType, but not TrueType. Programs like FontForge are retrofitting these features into TrueType, but obvious errors persist.
 

Than I checked mplus1p-regular-multilingual.ttf, I found a problem: it contains '量', but missing '变'(0x53d8), it's a common characters too. And I use it to generate PDF for my document, it missing a lot characters. I think M+ have not enough feedback for Chinese, maybe it's good for Japaness and Korea.

Thank you for evaluating. That's extremely useful information to know. Thanks to your insight, I can now talk about M+ more intelligently :)
 
Chinese has a lot of characters, common characters may have several thousand, when contains uncommon characters it comes to several ten thousand, and different regions have different variants (http://blog.typekit.com/2014/07/15/introducing-source-han-sans/). So CJK fonts will be large.

This is where native support for OpenType is essential. Unfortunately, it's still very new and not well supported or understood yet. But every journey begins with a single step and we are starting to grow the knowledge of fonts in the Asciidoctor community so we can start to make more informed decisions and plans.
 
NotoSans CJK is the most complete CJK font I know (different regions still need to install different font packages, because all CJK  characters up to 65535 limit. http://www.google.com/get/noto/cjk.html), DroidSansFallback is enough for common CJK use, M+ maybe not enough for Chinese common use.

Again, excellent information. Perhaps we can start with a theme for Asciidoctor PDF that uses DroidSans as the primary font and continue to research getting NotoSans to work for the future. Would you be willing to open an issue in asciidoctor-pdf to add a cjk theme that uses DroidSans by default?
 

Thanks for pay attention for CJK, I hope this content will be helpful.

Absolutely. This information you have provided is extremely helpful. I definitely want Asciidoctor to be a great toolchain for all languages. That starts with getting the characters on the screen and is further supported by informed decisions. Thanks for taking the time to provide this information and for participating!

Cheers!

-Dan

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