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> implement this imaginary font selection functionality We are already doing GSUB/GDEF tables and a lot of horrible stuff to display pretty glyphs on the scree

by mnau 2y ago

> implement this imaginary font selection functionality We are already doing GSUB/GDEF tables and a lot of horrible stuff to display pretty glyphs on the screen. Hell, there are literal instructions for VM in TTF files to help with pretty rasterization on low-res screens. Making font rendering library is hard, Nintendo hard. That's just a nature of the beast. Fonts are messy and if we want one standard to deal with it once and for all, that means some compromises must be done. CJK is not some obscure alphabet. In this case, perfect is enemy of good. I am just glad there really is only one (non-niche) standard, obligatory https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/

lmm 2y ago
> CJK is not some obscure alphabet. Right. One would think that misrendering a major world language used by over 100 million people would be an issue that warrants some attention. But too many of the HN crowd don't care. > In this case, perfect is enemy of good. It's not though. Unicode-only is not just imperfect, it's an outright regression for Japanese. Meanwhile traditional encoding-aware programs render Japanese just fine.
- mnau 2y ago
  > It's not though. Unicode-only is not just imperfect, it's an outright regression for Japanese. Unicode has variant selectors which can deal with region variants (e.g. https://imgur.com/a/syMcWNO https://imgur.com/a/syMcWNO) to deal with the issue. Granted, it's not very widely used, but Unicode provided a solution. The onus is now on application developers and font providers. Choosing to limit number of characters to 2 bytes was a good technical choice back in 1992, non-unified CJK wouldn't fit (that was a time of 2-4MB RAM and 100-200MB HDD). A solution to problem was later provided. Using Shift-JIS is like doing on-IP, non-UDP protocol on the internet. Sure, you can do it, but it's just non-perspective choice. A better invested time is on improving standard protocol, which is Unicode (e.g. conversion software).
  - lmm 2y ago
    > Unicode has variant selectors which can deal with region variants (e.g. https://imgur.com/a/syMcWNO https://imgur.com/a/syMcWNO) to deal with the issue. They're officially deprecated and cause issues with breaking search etc.. So they're still below feature parity with using a traditional encoding. Traditional encoding support is also easier to test since documents with traditional encodings are more widespread and exist for many world languages, not just Japanese.

by mnau 2y ago

lmm 2y ago

> CJK is not some obscure alphabet. Right. One would think that misrendering a major world language used by over 100 million people would be an issue that warrants some attention. But too many of the HN crowd don't care. > In this case, perfect is enemy of good. It's not though. Unicode-only is not just imperfect, it's an outright regression for Japanese. Meanwhile traditional encoding-aware programs render Japanese just fine.

mnau 2y ago
> It's not though. Unicode-only is not just imperfect, it's an outright regression for Japanese. Unicode has variant selectors which can deal with region variants (e.g. https://imgur.com/a/syMcWNO https://imgur.com/a/syMcWNO) to deal with the issue. Granted, it's not very widely used, but Unicode provided a solution. The onus is now on application developers and font providers. Choosing to limit number of characters to 2 bytes was a good technical choice back in 1992, non-unified CJK wouldn't fit (that was a time of 2-4MB RAM and 100-200MB HDD). A solution to problem was later provided. Using Shift-JIS is like doing on-IP, non-UDP protocol on the internet. Sure, you can do it, but it's just non-perspective choice. A better invested time is on improving standard protocol, which is Unicode (e.g. conversion software).
- lmm 2y ago
  > Unicode has variant selectors which can deal with region variants (e.g. https://imgur.com/a/syMcWNO https://imgur.com/a/syMcWNO) to deal with the issue. They're officially deprecated and cause issues with breaking search etc.. So they're still below feature parity with using a traditional encoding. Traditional encoding support is also easier to test since documents with traditional encodings are more widespread and exist for many world languages, not just Japanese.