by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2005/09/13 03:16 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2005/09/13/463943.aspx
On Sunday night I posted about a small fact in CJK fonts, when I talked about Fonts that are 'fixed-width' even if they do not claim to be.
I thought I would talk about a few other things about some of those fonts (the fixed width ones)....
Whether one looks at
the Gulim font used in Korean (abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz),
Or the SimSun font used for Simplified Chinese (abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz),
Or the MingLiU font used for Traditional Chinese (abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz),
Or the MS Gothic font used for Japanese (abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz),
There are few people who are used to typical fonts with the regular Latin A-Z glyphs like Arial or Tahoma who will claim that they enjoy the visual appearance of those letters in these CJK fonts. And it is not just the fixed width aspect of the letters that I talked about the other day which makes them look different....
Compare it to Courier New and see what *it* does (abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz).
See the difference in the descenders? Those are the little pieces of letters like the bottom of lowercase g, j, p, and q that stick out underneath the base of the letter. For most CJK fonts, an effort is made to make them not stick out as far. So that it is more within the same "block space" used by each letter.
But maybe it is perfectly reasonable to expect if you are using a font that contains 20,000 or more ideographic characters that work hard to fit within a specific block that you would want the latin characters to also fit within that block. So perhaps what looks strange to some people actually looks perfectly fine to someone who is using one of these fonts....
This post brought to you by "g" (U+0067, a.k.a. LATIN SMALL LETTER G)
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