Comment 29 for bug 475240

On 06/08/2010 10:58 AM, Scott Severance wrote:
> I'd like to second iEGL's suggestion to remove Hangeul from that font.
> After all, Hangeul is pretty much irrelevant to Chinese, which is the
> focus of that font. And there is already adequate Hangeul coverage
> included by default without that font. Let that font do its job of
> handling Chinese, and let Korean fonts handle Korean (by the way, Korean
> rarely uses Hanja; Hangeul is used almost all of the time). Why should a
> Chinese font include Hangeul?
>

I kindly disagree. First of all, the issue itself is only related
to an anti-aliasing setting in a fontconfig file. It has
nothing to do with the Hangul glyphs themselves
included in these font. The right solution has been
already provided in comment #8.

Secondly, because Korean people rarely use Han characters
does not mean Chinese won't use Hangul. For the same
reason, LGC people almost never use Chinese, that
won't give you a conclusion that all LGC characters
should be removed from Chinese fonts.
(Hangul are found in many Chinese ASCII arts,
and I believe many Korean literature and archives
have Hanja)

Thirdly, removing Hangul from these two fonts
gain little saving in terms of space. All Hangeul glyphs
are composed of references, and removing them
only save a few hundred KB. The price to pay is
that Chinese users have to install Korean fonts to read
Korean. That is almost tons of MB in space. A
single compact Unicode font is very important for
many mini-distributions and i18n support for open-source
games.

Lastly, Hanguls in Korean fonts and Chinese fonts
have different metrics and slightly different styles.
It is always good to have matched metrics when
displaying a text mixed with different languages.