Proposal : deprecate 'hngl' feature

[John Hudson]

I would like to propose that the 'hngl' Hangul layout feature be 
formally deprecated.
https://www.microsoft.com/typography/otspec/features_fj.htm#hngl

This feature is designed to represent Hanja characters with Hangul 
syllable glyphs, using either a GSUB lookup type 1 or 3 substitution 
mechanism. Since this feature misrepresents encoded characters with 
glyphs that have their own encodings, it falls into the same error class 
as the 'dpng' Diphthong and 'crcy' Currency features, which were 
deprecated in version 1.25 of the OT spec (July 2000). I believe the 
'hngl' feature was overlooked at that time. Conversion of Hanja 
characters to Hangul (and vice versa) is properly a character-level, 
dictionary-based operation.

Ken Lunde reports that Adobe have included the feature in their Korean 
fonts. I am not sure whether application support exists, or if any other 
font makers have chosen to implement this feature. Is anyone aware of 
any significant issues that would arise from dropping this feature from 
the specification, given that there are other, better mechanisms to 
achieve Hanja–Hangul conversion?

JH


-- 

John Hudson
Tiro Typeworks Ltd    www.tiro.com
Salish Sea, BC        tiro at tiro.com

Getting Spiekermann to not like Helvetica is like training
a cat to stay out of water. But I'm impressed that people
know who to ask when they want to ask someone to not like
Helvetica. That's progress. -- David Berlow