Font-geeking: BIG5, Unicode, and Windows XP

[ilai]

I have a collection of Traditional Chinese Truetype fonts, but they only have a BIG5 and not a Unicode-to-glyph mapping. I discovered though that in Windows XP, you can add the conversion table for CP950, make Windows display Chinese in menus, and then force it to install BIG5 fonts.

But then I found that the character 十 ("ten") does not display correctly. Examining the BIG5-to-Unicode mapping table revealed the problem: there's a conflict between the Hangzhou Numeral Ten (BIG5 0xA2CC) and the normal character for ten (BIG5 0xA451).

So I used TTX to dump the CMAP table, alter 0xA2CC to point to the same glyph as 0xA451, and merged the table back into the font. Voila, the font now displays correctly.

But you'd think that if Microsoft were smart and erred on the side of caution, they would have defaulted to using the normal glyph for 十 in Unicode (0x5341). Alas.

Comments

[boonleong.livejournal.com]

This is extremely confusing. Hopefully it'll make more sense to me when I go home in summer and install Asian fonts on my laptop.