[mpeg-OTspec] Proposal : deprecate 'hngl' feature

[Ken Lunde]

John,

As the person who is guilt of, er, um, responsible for registering the 'hngl' feature 10 to 15 years ago, I have no particular objection to deprecating its use.

The rationale for this feature was to enable the rendering of Korean text that includes hanja (ideographs) in such a way that substitutes only the hanja for their corresponding hangul, and without disrupting the original text stream. If such OpenType features are frowned upon, then deprecate away.

Regards...

-- Ken

> On Nov 2, 2015, at 9:38 AM, John Hudson john at tiro.ca [mpeg-OTspec] <mpeg-OTspec-noreply at yahoogroups.com> wrote:
> 
> 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
> 
> 
>