Comment 35 for bug 521163

(In reply to comment #24)
>
> Nak.
>
> If Chinese fonts are put in front of Japanese/Korean fonts, Japanese/Korean
> text have same issue because each languages has different letter shape in same
> code of Unicode. That's why I suggest to split c/j/k configuration files.
>
> ex.
> pango-view --waterfall --text='与返骨直' --language=zh_CN
> pango-view --waterfall --text='与返骨直' --language=zh_TW
> pango-view --waterfall --text='与返骨直' --language=ja

In my opinion, 65-nonlatin is only responsible for font selection when there is no preference in specific CJK variants, such as in en_US. The only requirement is how to display characters consistently, without disturbing the readers by seeing multiple CJK fonts in a continuous text flow. In this case, the code-point coverage and font glyph consistency are the only criteria that I can think of. If the system locale is set to en_US, and only Japanese and Korean fonts were installed, I really don't know which one should be preferred (it would be better to have a Chinese font installed by default).

If any of the CJK is preferred, these settings should be in a language-specific fontconfig file, which is explained in the thread of my proposal at https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=499902

(basically the same idea as you split cjk files, except it maintain a default non-CJK locale font order in 65-nolatin, and CJK specific files use lang tag to set the preferences)

>
> cf. http://d.hatena.ne.jp/mashabow/20090514/1242292024
> 'Arial Unicode MS' has multiple letter shapes. It's great.
>

this is interesting. I really want to know which table is used for variants. I have thought about doing this in the WenQuanYi's fonts.