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Chữ nôm

(tagged all chữ nôm characters as language "vi-hani" so that enabled browsers (like mine) may use a Vietnamese font to render them (available fonts are: "Nom Na Tong" and "HAN NOM A" & "HAN NOM B")) (current)

Hi, interesting. Would you have time to do a little explaining of this a bit on the Talk:Chữ nôm page ... sounds useful and and might be notable content in the article itself? In ictu oculi (talk) 16:11, 2 April 2013 (UTC)

Many thanks for explanation. Btw there has been an edit to your edit here. Cheers In ictu oculi (talk) 01:01, 3 April 2013 (UTC)

The vi-nom template

It seems that vi-nom is identical to Nom Na Tong, and distinct from the default font:

羅吧固𧵑得𥪝𤄯𠊛与今骨 (default)

羅吧固𧵑得𥪝𤄯𠊛与今骨 vi-nom

羅吧固𧵑得𥪝𤄯𠊛与今骨 Nom Na Tong

Compare the default font to HAN NOM A and HAN NOM B:

羅吧固𧵑得𥪝𤄯𠊛与今骨 (default)

羅吧固𧵑得𥪝𤄯𠊛与今骨 HAN NOM A

羅吧固𧵑得𥪝𤄯𠊛与今骨 HAN NOM B

HAN NOM A has an extremely subtle variation on the third character. HAN NOM B has similar variation on the eighth character. But essentially these three fonts are identical. I suggest dropping both HAN NOM A and HAN NOM B from the vi-nom template. Do you think it would help to replace them with a font that covers CJK-C? Another issue is that the name vi-nom is quite confusing. It looks like a lang parameter, but it isn't. Could we change the name to "Nom" or "HanNom"? Kauffner (talk) 18:03, 6 April 2013 (UTC)

Of course we could change its name, but only if there’s good reason to do so. I chose the name in accordance with the names of similar templates for Chinese that are typically called like {{zh-zhuyin}}, {{zh-trad}} or {{zh-viet}}. IMO template users should read a template’s documentation before they use it. And vi-nom is not a defined locale that could be used with {{lang}} anyway.

As to the HAN NOM fonts: I don’t like them either, and their style seems to be a mere copy of mainland Chinese Sòngtǐ 宋体 fonts. However I am reluctant to just drop the HAN NOM fonts. We might insert other font family names between Nom Na Tong and those instead, e.g. Sun-ExtB and MingLiu_HKSCS-ExtB. And Andrew’s BabelStone Han contains 456 of the 4149 Extension C characters as well. --LiliCharlie 20:12, 6 April 2013 (UTC)

• Although I have all those fonts installed, I can display the notorious 𫋙/càng character only with HanaMinB. In any case, the CJK-C characters are pretty obscure, likely to be used only in the context of "stuff recently added to Unicode". Take a look at Han unification. I used vi-nom to add Vietnamese characters to the charts. Kauffner (talk) 03:37, 7 April 2013 (UTC)

• I have updated the list of fonts in the template {{vi-nom}}. Please keep me informed if this fixes your display problems. If not I might consider reverting to the old template. --LiliCharlie 15:58, 7 April 2013 (UTC)

I think the problem is that "Nom Na Tong" is at the head of the list in vi-nom, so if installed it is always used, even for CJK-C characters, which it does not cover. A possibility is to create a separate template for CJK-C and CJK-D characters that just lists fonts that support CJK-C and CJK-D, and use that for 𫋙 rather than vi-nom. BabelStone (talk) 16:56, 7 April 2013 (UTC)

Sounds good. So the new template would only list a few SIP fonts. And the day browser/OS support for CJK-C/D is sufficient it could be redefined as {{vi-nom|{{{1}}}}} and thus become synonymous with {{vi-nom}}. Would {{vi-nom-C-D|...} be an appropriate name for the new template, or is {{vi-nom-CJK-C-D|...} a better choice? --LiliCharlie 17:43, 7 April 2013 (UTC)

The new template for Extensions C and D has been created. I have chosen to call it {{vi-nom-CJK-C-D}} and it has already been applied to the two occurrences of the character 𫋙 in the article Han-Nom. Please report if it works for you. --LiliCharlie 02:51, 8 April 2013 (UTC)

Thanks, that works for me (with HanaMinB installed on my computer). "HAN NOM B" (and HanNom-B?) only accidentally includes 106 CJK-C characters because it put a number of unencoded characters in the reserved code points at the end of the CJK-B block and these later became part of CJK-C with the result that HAN NOM B (and HanNom-B?) has completely the wrong glyphs for CJK-C characters U+2A700 through U+2A769. Therefore, HAN NOM B (and HanNom-B?) should be removed from the template list. BabelStone (talk) 10:59, 8 April 2013 (UTC)

Glad it works for you. I remember having noticed that HAN NOM B’s encoding is faulty, but that was several years ago, and since I had alternative fonts and never liked and used it I later forgot. — HANNOM-B is the font’s PostScript name. I know that only font family names should be used in CSS, and not PS names, but it’s an old habit of mine to list them too, as this won’t do any harm but might improve someone’s display... --LiliCharlie 20:51, 8 April 2013 (UTC)

• Great job! It displays for me too. Perhaps you could shorten the name of the template. After all, this one isn't specific to Vietnam. It could be just CJK-C-D. Kauffner (talk) 14:30, 8 April 2013 (UTC)

• Finally! Gives me the feeling I’ve been helpful. — {{vi-nom-CJK-C-D}} is language specific: Notice that I plan to make it synonymous with {{vi-nom}} when it is no longer needed (see above), and if an expanded version of Nom Na Tong or an equivalent font is available, it will come on top of the template’s font list. All CJKV fonts are locale specific. The Japanese wouldn’t want their character for zen displayed as 禅 instead of 禅 (with ㇔㇒ instead of ㇔㇔㇒), nor do Hong Kongers like to see their window character as 窗 for 窗 (with ㇒㇒㇔ instead of ㇒㇇㇔). If you don’t see the difference use the government-official standard fonts 華康標準宋體=DFSongStd from HK and 全字庫正宋體=TW-Sung from TW; for Kǎitǐ 楷體 style I recommend 華康香港標準楷書=DFHKStdKai-B5 and 全字庫正楷體=TW-Kai. — BTW, it’s great that the article Han unification now has Nôm in the comparative table. As my window example showed the Chinese examples should be given by country, as in the Chinese WP, and other information is misleading as well. I hope I’ll find the time to write a versatile JavaScript called Script Display Tester later this month, and then will take care of Han unification. I think I have a good knowledge of local differences in CJKV typography. --LiliCharlie 20:51, 8 April 2013 (UTC)

• For many of the examples on the chart, the differences quite trivial. We could remove some of them and focus on those where the differences are more significant. The biggest difference is between the mainland Chinese font and the Taiwanese font. Of course, that's Cold War politics rather than language. One or the other must have decided to create a distinct font so you can use typography to express political loyalty. If we could somehow add a font from the 1920s to the chart, we might have to reinterpret what it means to use "traditional" font. Kauffner (talk) 10:22, 9 April 2013 (UTC)

Well, Singapore has copied mainland China’s typographical manners for decades, and printed matter from Hong Kong as well as from Malaysia more and more resembles what comes from Běijīng and Shànghǎi, too, so this matter is no longer a battle that’s keeps Cold War alive. — Until ten years ago Taiwanese officials persecuted anyone who dared to publish in simplified characters. That was orthographic Cold War! And that atmosphere certainly had a strong influence on the island’s font scene and Taiwanese art as a whole. Fortunately its rulers have come to reason, and even sanctioned Hànyǔ pīnyīn. Things have become much more relaxed and a little more mixed, and there are now web sites on the mainland like the Buddhist Homeland Shrouded in Mists ;-) that are entirely in traditional characters. To be sure, all this is not intended as a comment on the nature and quality of countries’ political systems, let alone their peoples.

Sometimes the difference between traditional and simplified characters is even more complicated. 薴 níng ‘limonene’ has the simplified form 苧; however 苧 zhù ‘a type of grass’ is a traditional character which has the simplified form 苎. In this case wrong or no use of zh-hant and zh-hans not only causes an unwanted display, but may have strange effects on translation software, conversion software, etc. Try the conversion of 苧 in both directions with BabelStone’s BabelPad. This is a nice example of the effects of Unicode’s Han unification policy and of the necessity—not only for display—to use zh-hant vs. zh-hans markup for Chinese.

If you are seriously interested in the matter of font display we could try font embedding. For a start I could produce a WOFF font that contains just the two glyphs for 𫋙 and ⿰朝乙, so the font file the browser automatically downloads would be tiny. As you know I already have ⿰朝乙 in SVG format which is easy to convert. This technology has several advantages: it is now supported by all major browsers, so you can be way over 90% sure readers view the characters as intended, and it is a real vector font that doesn’t look as ugly as a magnified pixel image, and matches in size with the other characters. I’m not sure if Wikimedia support uploading web fonts though, but if you are interested I will check. --LiliCharlie 21:53, 9 April 2013 (UTC)

If you want to try, that's certainly fine with me. I was thinking the giàu character might look nicer if we photoshopped the background. But otherwise I'm satisfied with how it looks now. I put the article up for DYK, but it was rejected. It seems to me the writing is well above DYK standard. I'm sure it was IIO's carping that killed the nomination. Guy stalks me everywhere, a vindictive Frenchman with too much time on his hands. Kauffner (talk) 09:27, 10 April 2013 (UTC)

It was rather rude to reject your DYK nomination without any explanation, but I think the reason would be that the article has to be nominated within 5 days of creation (DYK rules), and it was created on 9th March but only nominated on 19th March (sometimes a little leeway is allowed, but 10 days is too long). Wrt web fonts, I think that might be a good idea, but probably would need wider discussion amongst the community. If we could upload suitably licensed web fonts to Commons and use them to display characters not generally catered for out of the box that would be a great improvement for articles which use obscure scripts and characters. BabelStone (talk) 10:36, 10 April 2013 (UTC)

Nom language warning

Do you know that we already have {{Contains Vietnamese text}}? Kauffner (talk) 15:55, 6 April 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for the hint, Kauffner. I’m not sure if {{Contains Vietnamese text}} should be changed to tell the user to install Nôm fonts, and delete the not yet functional template {{Contains Nom text}} after it has been replaced by {{Contains Vietnamese text}} on all pages, or if it’s better to keep {{Contains Vietnamese text}} as a general browser support warning and write {{Contains Nom text}} as a font specific template. What do you think? Do we need separate templates for these two things? --LiliCharlie 19:35, 6 April 2013 (UTC)

The Vietnamese alphabet displays for Windows 95 and later. It is only Han-Nom that is an issue. So there is no need for two templates. Kauffner (talk) 19:10, 8 April 2013 (UTC)

Web Fonts

I've put your test web fonts on my website for testing at http://www.babelstone.co.uk/Fonts/NomWebExtension.ttf and http://www.babelstone.co.uk/Fonts/NomWebExtension.woff as requested (the woff file is there but I can't get any of my browsers to admit that it is there). I'm afraid that I'm not too sure where you would engage the greater community in discussions on the use of web fonts as I tend not to get involved in discussions on policy, etc. Probably best to raise it at WP:TECHPUMP. BabelStone (talk) 22:56, 10 April 2013 (UTC)

Thank you for hosting my fonts. As your website doesn’t seem to recognize files in WOFF format I have now hosted NomWebExtension.woff at http://typefront.com where it is available for embedding in en.WP at http://typefront.com/fonts/825591377.woff​.

This is a first test with embedded fonts. The first and last characters 雨 and 没 are only for reference; the two in the middle are our notorious ⿰虫強 at u+2B2D9 (CJK Unified Ideographs Extension C) and ⿰朝乙 at u+F8000 (Supplementary Private Use Area-A). The first line is an attempt at embedding the WOFF font from typefront.com and in the second line I try to embed the corresponding TTF from babelstone.co.uk.

雨𫋙󸀀没

雨𫋙󸀀没

WP obviously doesn’t allow my style='@font-face {...}' definitions and overwrites them with style="/* insecure input */". This test has failed. --LiliCharlie 01:08, 12 April 2013 (UTC)

Interesting, but perhaps not that surprising. It seems that you would have to get changes made to the MediaWiki software to support web fonts, which I can't imagine would be easy, especially if people have concerns about potential misuse of web fonts for nefarious purposes. BabelStone (talk) 01:49, 12 April 2013 (UTC)

I don’t dare start a discussion on this topic. First, I am a lover of writing systems, typography and calligraphy rather than a programmer with a highly technical background. And what’s more English is neither my first nor my second language, so I fear that talks might break down because of insufficient linguistic and/or cultural competence on my part. It’s a pity, for so many Misplaced Pages articles could be drastically improved if only nearly universally supported modern font technology were also supported by MediaWiki and Wikimedia Commons. If you look at HTML/CSS code you will discover that a surprisingly high number of webpages “already” rely on font embedding (i.e. 15 years after its first employment), and as far as I’m aware it works without any security issues that are worth mentioning.

Font trivia

This document (in Vietnamese) says that the Nom Na Tong font is based on characters found in the 1933 edition of a book called Thiền Tông Bản Hạnh (The Origin of Buddhist Meditation) by Thanh Tu Thich. Kauffner (talk) 16:25, 15 April 2013 (UTC)

Buddhist monasteries all over the Sinosphere are a great source for countless CJKV characters. The monks and nuns kept inventing 漢字 in an effort to render expressions they found in Buddhist texts written in a large number of foreign languages, or to convey the uniqueness and unspeakableness of their mystical experiences. I’m sure that many more characters from Buddhist texts will be added to Unicode over time, but diligent systematic studies are necessary before further proposals can be submitted to the IRG. --LiliCharlie 03:33, 17 April 2013 (UTC)

Another Nom template

There is yet another language template for Vietnamese you might want to check out: {{vie}}. On another issue, I adjusted the {{vi-nom}} template and it now seems to work for CJK-C and CJK-D characters as well. Kauffner (talk) 20:52, 8 May 2013 (UTC)

• Thank you for pointing to {{vie}}. To my mind the template could be improved by adding HanaMinA so there is less mixing of different fonts. For example the (Japanese) character u+8217 舗 of the documentation is displayed with PMingLiU although I have Nom Na Tong and all fonts of the HanaMin series installed. Also 城舗胡志明 (with the said Japanese character) for Thành phố Hồ Chí Minh of the template documentation looks strange to me. Shouldn’t that be written 城舖胡志明?
• The {{vi-nom}} template had always worked on my system, and {{vi-nom-CJK-C-D}} was created because you had issues with {{vi-nom}} on yours. I have no means of testing if {{vi-nom}} now works on all platforms. If you are not 100% sure {{vi-nom}} works with Extensions C and D on all systems I still recommend using {{vi-nom-CJK-C-D}}. LiliCharlie 06:29, 9 May 2013 (UTC)

• It looks like {{vie}} was copied from Japanese Wiki and 城舗胡志明 is "Ho Chi Minh City" in Japanese. This is a bad example since it is a modern name that was never written in Han or Nom -- unless you count Wiki zh-classical, which gives "胡志明市". I copied the font list from {{vi-nom}} to {{vie}}, so the two templates should have the same output now. The use of a separate Vietnam-oriented template for recently added Unicode characters is a kludge, so IMO {{vi-nom}} is the better solution. The {{vi-nom-CJK-C-D}} template can be renamed and presented as a solution for displaying the CJK-C and CJK-D characters in general, since this problem is not specific to Vietnamese.

On an unrelated issue: Check out the charts at Han unification. I make some changes recently. Kauffner (talk) 09:08, 9 May 2013 (UTC)

• Yes, I felt that {{vi-nom-CJK-C-D}} was a hack from the very start, and this was the reason I wrote that I wished it to be become synonymous with {{vi-nom}} some day. Yet it seems to have fixed your display problems at one time. (I remember BabelStone’s remark that in a character string an Extension B/C character was not displayed for you because the font on your system was already determined by the surrounding characters, or something to this effect. — Please keep in mind that an isolated character may look different from the very same character within a sequence of characters.)

I closely watched any changes to Han unification and I appreciate your edits very much. — Obvious, though not serious, errors are: the code points for u+9913 餓 and u+997F 饿 are reversed and u+7985 禅/禅 has a traditional character equivalent that is not mentioned, u+79AA 襌. These shortcomings are not fundamental though. — I fail to understand the last sentence of the introduction to the examples: Why on earth is there mention of “non-graphical language tag characters ... for plain text language tagging” if using these tag characters is strongly discouraged?

I am in the process of creating SVG images for all the characters in the tables of Han unification and its equivalents in three or four other WP languages. Whenever available images for the six Unicode CJKV chart (or source) locales will be produced.

Generally speaking I think that the article Han unification (which is about how the Unicode Consortium decided to encode characters) might be improved by closely following the Unicode specifications. Illustrative sample glyphs should be given for the same locales as are given in the Unicode charts (China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, Viet Nam), irrespective of language or the traditional vs. simplified character distinction. (N.B.: for the sample characters in the two tables of Han unification I can show you that the government official reference fonts of HK (DFSongStd = 華康標準宋體) and TW (TW-Sung = 全字庫正宋體) have clearly different glyphs for at least 10 characters, even though the fonts that ship with Mr Gates’s Windows are somewhat less divergent.) — To closely follow the Unicode standard also means to talk about semantic variants etc. Please be—or get—prepared to talk about how Unicode handles CJKV characters (which is not the same way as they are traditionally treated in East or West Eurasia).

As I am neither a native nor second language speaker of English I am reluctant to make changes to en.WP. Please go ahead and make the changes I don’t dare make. Together we are strong. LiliCharlie 00:02, 10 May 2013 (UTC)

• I fixed the mistakes you mentioned at the top of the post, but I don't really understand what you are proposing lower down. What characters do you want to use? There are 26 characters on "language dependent" chart now, which I think is too many. When the differences are slight, there is no great lost in removing a row altogether. Traditional vs simplified is not a true language dependency anyway. A Japanese vs. Chinese variation is likely to be of wider interest. So I think we could boil it down to 10 or 15 rows. I like the "Zen" character issue you mentioned before. We should be able to do some more with that. That's certainly a better talking point than the "grass" character that gets brought up so much.
• I too have an ambitious font project: to get the {{lang-vi}} template to apply the best available fonts for Vietnamese. The first step is a font comparison, which I am doing here. Kauffner (talk) 15:00, 10 May 2013 (UTC)

• That’s right, there is no need for a larger number of sample characters. And yes, 禪/禅/禅 is a nice one that can be elaborated on.
• The reason I insist on the zh-HK vs. zh-TW distinction is that some characters that are dis-unified in TW and hence in Unicode get re-unified in HK, in a way of speaking. This is the reverse of what happened to 禅/禅. — To get an impression please go to http://glyph.iso10646hk.net/english/download_001.jsp and download the official Hong Kong ISO 10646 reference font DFSongStd/華康標準宋體, and to http://www.cns11643.gov.tw/AIDB/download.do?name=字型下載 and download the official Taiwanese (general) reference font TW-Sung/全字庫正宋體. Then install them and make them (temporarily or permanently) the fonts your browser uses to display text in the zh-HK and zh-TW locales and then have a look at these characters that are already in the tables of the Han unification article:

兌兑稅税 (zh-HK)

兌兑稅税 (zh-TW)

Actually Hong Kong officials seem to refuse to make the BIG-5 distinction that entered into the Unicode standard but was not judged to be a case of compatibility characters for pre-existing encodings by the IRG, because it doesn’t make sense to the experts from Hong Kong (nor to me, BTW) and because their typographic tradition is much closer to that of Mainland China (and maybe also influenced by the comparatively strong Japanese speaking minority of HK, though this seems less important in this context. — To be sure, what I like to call character “re-unification” is more than just a matter of using different glyphs. Rather it’s a silent but official way of saying: “You BIG-5 encoders and Unicoders have overdone the Han dis-unification thing.”

• When I said I wanted to closely follow the Unicode Standard I meant that all Unicode Han Database “fields” that have become necessary by the way the Unicode Consortium decided to handle Han characters deserve mention consideration. At this point the complete list of UniHan fields is: kAccountingNumeric, kBigFive, kCangjie, kCantonese, kCCCII, kCheungBauer, kCheungBauerIndex, kCihaiT, kCNS1986, kCNS1992, kCompatibilityVariant, kCowles, kDaeJaweon, kDefinition, kEACC, kFenn, kFennIndex, kFourCornerCode, kFrequency, kGB0, kGB1, kGB3, kGB5, kGB7, kGB8, kGradeLevel, kGSR, kHangul, kHanYu, kHanyuPinlu, kHanyuPinyin, kHDZRadBreak, kHKGlyph, kHKSCS, kIBMJapan, kIICore, kIRG_GSource, kIRG_HSource, kIRG_JSource, kIRG_KPSource, kIRG_KSource, kIRG_MSource, kIRG_TSource, kIRG_USource, kIRG_VSource, kIRGDaeJaweon, kIRGDaiKanwaZiten, kIRGHanyuDaZidian, kIRGKangXi, kJapaneseKun, kJapaneseOn, kJis0, kJis1, kJIS0213, kKangXi, kKarlgren, kKorean, kKPS0, kKPS1, kKSC0, kKSC1, kLau, kMainlandTelegraph, kMandarin, kMatthews, kMeyerWempe, kMorohashi, kNelson, kOtherNumeric, kPhonetic, kPrimaryNumeric, kPseudoGB1, kRSAdobe_Japan1_6, kRSJapanese, kRSKangXi, kRSKanWa, kRSKorean, kRSUnicode, kSBGY, kSemanticVariant, kSimplifiedVariant, kSpecializedSemanticVariant, kTaiwanTelegraph, kTang, kTotalStrokes, kTraditionalVariant, kVietnamese, kXerox, kXHC1983, and kZVariant.

More especially none of the fields that have “Variant” or “Source” in their names can be omitted if we are really talking about Unicode/UniHan, and not Han characters in general. — Rome wasn’t built in a day, and the article can only be developed by and by, too. Han characters are a vast (actually an open-ended) field of research and contemplation.

• For your work on the lang-vi template make sure you don’t forget the fonts that ship with Mac OS, and maybe Linux and Android as well. Richard Ishida has created an overview of non-Latin-Cyrillic-Greek Windows and Mac OS fonts by script, and he updates the list when new versions of these two OS’s are launched. The links given in the notes section at the bottom of his page might serve you as a starting point for finding Vietnamese Mac OS fonts. If you have no access to a Mac/Linux/Android OS you could try to ask a friend/someone to send you screenshots or allow you to use their computer for a couple of minutes. LiliCharlie 09:36, 11 May 2013 (UTC)

• No, I haven't been purged or anything like that, but thanks for your concern. I took a trip to the delta for a few days. I come back to find my user page missing and the focus of considerable uproar.

Anyway, let's get back to fonts. I downloaded both the Hong Kong and Taiwanese fonts you mentioned above and I added them to the comparison chart in my sandbox. TW-Sung looks all messed up on Google Chrome, so I would advise against its use on Misplaced Pages. They throw Unicode and Big5 together, so the font has 113,000 character codes -- the opposite of Han unification.

I didn't notice any display problems with DFSongStd, the HK standard font. In the majority of cases, the HK character is identical to the one in the Taiwanese font. In some cases, DFSongStd uses a hybrid of the mainland and Taiwanese character. On Wiki, zh-HK yields the same font as zh-TW. Has HK always had its own fonts? There was no political motive to create a distinct local font under the British, so why would anyone bother? In any case, they obviously have one now. User:Rjanag maintains the {{lang-zh}} template, so we can ask him make appropriate adjustments.

With the fields, I was thinking that we could have a box on the right that gives three or four of the fields for each character. The fields related to nationality strike me as the most relevant. For example, the reader may interpret a row differently depending on whether the character has a Japanese, Korean or Vietnamese field.

{{lang-vi}} should probably make the font look like it does on a Vietnamese site, with Arial or New Times Roman for the alphabetic script and Nom Na Tong for the Han characters.

Do you know what character is being shown on this page? I checked 9.7, but I did not find it. Kauffner (talk) 08:19, 15 May 2013 (UTC)

• The character you were looking for in vain is U+51B7 冷. It’s quite a common one meaning cold (literally and figuratively). Unicode has also encoded a corresponding kZVariant/compatibility character U+F92E.

As regards fonts Hong Kong and Taiwan have different needs since people have to be able to write their own different languages that require different characters — Taiwanese Mǐn Nán vs. Cantonese Yuè. Moreover there are special characters in use for place names and proper names that don’t occur elsewhere. Never forget that even tiny Macao needed 16 characters of their own to be encoded in Unicode, and Singapore contributed 226 own characters. — The names issue sometimes has strange effects: For decades even smaller Mainland Chinese character dictionaries showed the “Japanese-only” character 畑 and defined it as a character used as a Japanese family name or similar. The reason was that Chairman Máo had once met a Japanese who used that character in his name... — For such character borrowings UniHan seems a perfect solution to me.

It should be noted that UniHan unifies characters used 1. in different eras 2. at different places 3. for different languages. — FYI, valid ISO 639-3 codes for Chinese languages are: cdo: Min Dong Chinese; cjy: Jinyu Chinese; cmn: Mandarin Chinese; cpx: Pu-Xian Chinese; czh: Huizhou Chinese; czo: Min Zhong Chinese; gan: Gan Chinese; hak: Hakka Chinese; hsn: Xiang Chinese; ltc: Late Middle Chinese; lzh: Literary Chinese; mnp: Min Bei Chinese; nan: Min Nan Chinese (includes Taiwanese); och: Old Chinese; wuu: Wu Chinese (includes Shanghainese); yue: Yue Chinese (includes Cantonese); zho: Chinese (= ISO 639-1 zh) . All these require their own set of characters and may be used at the start of locale codes. — There are also ISO 639-3 codes for older forms of Japanese and Korean, but strangely only vie = ISO 639-1 vi for Vietnamese. I have no idea why.

I very much appreciate your efforts to solve display problems and even show the existing differences between Hong Kong and Taiwanese typographic traditions on your fonts page.

I am almost done with my UniHan SVGs. I have decided to show the characters exactly as they are seen in the Unicode character code chart PDFs (only much enlarged), for up to six IRG sources. I hope I can make a preview page with probably 107 SVGs for 206 Unicode characters available soon. — How do you judge the following sentence linguistically and in content: “The reproduction for purely scientific and informational non-profit purposes of this minimal proportion of the Unicode Character Code Charts which are copyrighted by US based Unicode, Inc. falls within the fair use doctrine of United States copyright law and the fair dealing doctrine and similar doctrines of limitations and exceptions to copyright of other jurisdictions.”? LiliCharlie 23:39, 24 May 2013 (UTC)

Another extension E character

I noticed that the character for phở, the famous Vietnamese soup, is in Extension E. It is 񣂝 (⿰米頗) and is No. 06234 in the proposal. Perhaps you could make another svg? Kauffner (talk) 04:43, 23 May 2013 (UTC)

LiliCharlie 23:39, 24 May 2013 (UTC)

Han-Nom

Someone is trying to get rid of my Han-Nom article again, as you can see here. Kauffner (talk) 05:45, 24 May 2013 (UTC)

If Misplaced Pages is to be encyclopaedic the article must stay. LiliCharlie 23:39, 24 May 2013 (UTC)