> Java WorkShop includes a "point-and-click" text editor.
> For Asian locales, this text editor (and apparently other
> non-Java editors like "vi") expect there to be a fixed 2-to-1
> ratio in the width of Latin and Asian characters. I don't
> know much about writing a text editor, but I can see that
> this fixed width ratio would be important for text alignment.
> With the current JDKs (both 1.1.5 and 1.2beta2) we have not
> been able to achieve this.
>
> For example, in the Japanese locale, the font.properties.ja
> file specifies that the "monospaced" font first try to use
> the "courier" font, followed by the "morisawa-gothic...jisx0208"
> and "morisawa-gothic...jisx0201" fonts. Thus, the Latin
> characters will be drawn with the "courier" font, the Kanji (sp?)
> characters with the "morisawa-gothic...jisx0208" font, and
> the 1/2-width Katakana characters with the "morisawa-gothic...jisx0201"
> font. (I'm pretty clueless about i18n issues, so please pardon
> whatever mistakes I'm making here.) For a given point size,
> there is a 2-to-1 width ratio between the two "morisawa gothic"
> fonts, but the "courier" font has an average width somewhere
> around 1.5 (instead of 1.0).
>
> With the help of Naoyuki.Ishimura@Japan, we discovered how native
> (non-Java) text editors solve this problem, and we put the same
> solution into Java WorkShop. Since this seems like a fairly
> general problem, and since we are trying very hard to get our
> JDK in sync with JavaSoft's JDK, we would like you to consider
> this solution (or any better solution that you can come up with)
> as an RFE for JDK 1.2.
>
> If you look at the fontsets defined in
> /usr/openwin/lib/locale/ja/OW_FONT_SETS/OpenWindows.fs,
> you will see that they use only fonts from the same family,
> e.g., -*-gothic-medium-..., without mixing in "courier" to
> handle the Latin characters. Apparently, the first half of
> the glyphs in the "-*-gothic...jisx0201" font are for Latin
> characters, and the second half are for the 1/2-width Katakana
> characters. You don't need the "courier" font to display the
> Latin characters. We changed the "monospaced" font in
> font.properties.ja to only use the "morisawa-gothic" fonts,
> and this solved our problem. We also had to add some new
> character set converters to handle a few special characters.
> This same solution also applies to other Asian locales and
> works with both Solaris and win32.