Does the Unified Han character encoding in Unicode mean that I only need one CJK font for Asia, or do I have to allow for choices between different styles of CJK fonts for different countries?
Broadly speaking, there are four traditions for character shapes in East Asia: traditional Chinese (used primarily in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and overseas Chinese communities), simplified Chinese (used primarily in mainland China and Singapore), Japanese, and Korean. Using a single font for all four locales allows the characters to be legible, but means that some characters may look odd. For optimal results a system localized for use in Japan, for example, should use a font designed explicitly for use with Japanese, rather than a generic Unihan font.
Related Questions
- Does the Unified Han character encoding in Unicode mean that I only need one CJK font for Asia, or do I have to allow for choices between different styles of CJK fonts for different countries?
- How may character set negotiation be used to negotiate Unicode with UTF-8 encoding?
- What is unicode policy for character encoding?
