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I like the implementation of CJK fonts in Noto, which was just released this week. I particularly like that I can illustrate that the various Sinitic languages

I like the implementation of CJK fonts in Noto, which was just released this week. I particularly like that I can illustrate that the various Sinitic languages ("Chinese dialects") do NOT all use the same written characters, so that Chinese people who travel to different dialect regions sometimes find written signs that they cannot read, even if they are literate in Modern Standard Chinese. (I have seen this regional illiteracy on the part of native speakers of Chinese in several contexts.) How you might write the conversation "Does he know how to speak Mandarin? "No, he doesn't." 他會說普通話嗎？他不會。 in Modern Standard Chinese characters contrasts with how you would write "Does he know how to speak Cantonese? "No, he doesn't." 佢識唔識講廣東話？佢唔識。 in the Chinese characters used to write Cantonese. As will readily appear even to readers who don't know Chinese characters (if you have a good Unicode implementation enabled as you read Hacker News), many more words than "Mandarin" and "Cantonese" differ between those sentences in Chinese characters.

jlebar 12y ago
I thought Han Unification meant that (most of the common) CJK characters were represented by the same Unicode code points, and that the way to differentiate like this is by specifying metadata that indicates the "language". Obviously I'm wrong, because these are just regular Unicode characters, without an HTML "lang" attribute. What gives?
- fenomas 12y ago
  Two separate issues. Pan-CJK fonts like Noto solve a problem that arises from the fact that many CJK characters are only ever used in certain locales. Since most CJK fonts are made for a given locale, they tend not to include any of the (many) CJK characters never used in that locale. Hence, if you render mixed CJK text in (say) a Japanese font, any characters that don't appear in Japanese won't render at all. That's what (I believe) this comment refers to. The Han Unification problem arises from the inverse case - characters that are used in several languages but rendered differently depending on locale[0]. For those characters, they'll render even without a pan-CJK font, but the problem is they'll render in a way that's not appropriate for their locale. [0] Another way to phrase this would be "distinct characters which share a code point becaus Unicode mistakenly thinks they're a single character whose rendering differs by locale". The difference is basically subjective.
  - amake 12y ago
    > if you render mixed CJK text in (say) a Japanese font, any characters that don't appear in Japanese won't render at all. In theory, yes, but that almost never happens. What really happens is that any missing characters will fall back to a different font, so the text is legible but looks terrible from an aesthetic point of view.

jlebar 12y ago

I thought Han Unification meant that (most of the common) CJK characters were represented by the same Unicode code points, and that the way to differentiate like this is by specifying metadata that indicates the "language". Obviously I'm wrong, because these are just regular Unicode characters, without an HTML "lang" attribute. What gives?

fenomas 12y ago
Two separate issues. Pan-CJK fonts like Noto solve a problem that arises from the fact that many CJK characters are only ever used in certain locales. Since most CJK fonts are made for a given locale, they tend not to include any of the (many) CJK characters never used in that locale. Hence, if you render mixed CJK text in (say) a Japanese font, any characters that don't appear in Japanese won't render at all. That's what (I believe) this comment refers to. The Han Unification problem arises from the inverse case - characters that are used in several languages but rendered differently depending on locale[0]. For those characters, they'll render even without a pan-CJK font, but the problem is they'll render in a way that's not appropriate for their locale. [0] Another way to phrase this would be "distinct characters which share a code point becaus Unicode mistakenly thinks they're a single character whose rendering differs by locale". The difference is basically subjective.
- amake 12y ago
  > if you render mixed CJK text in (say) a Japanese font, any characters that don't appear in Japanese won't render at all. In theory, yes, but that almost never happens. What really happens is that any missing characters will fall back to a different font, so the text is legible but looks terrible from an aesthetic point of view.