Sun 09 Jul 2017 05:07:33 AM UTC, comment #1:
David,
This goes far beyond the capabilities of Unifont. I will try to explain why.
When I thought to create a block of Hangul syllables that used one glyph for each letter, superimposing three letters to form a syllable, a well-educated person from Korea told me that no Korean would ever be satisfied with such an approach, that frankly the result would look like the syllables were written by a little child who had not learned the rules of writing Hangul. That is what you will produce if you try to combine Hangul letters together in a syllable when each letter only has one variation.
There was a program called Hanterm that ran under an xterm window that used several variations for each glyph, with rules as to how they were combined to form syllables. Jungshik Shin (a Korean) had donated a Perl script to the Unifont effort to use the Hanterm fonts to create syllables. Unfortunately, the Hanterm glyphs were never licensed for use in anything except Hanterm. I was unable to locate the author of those fonts to get permission to use them in Unifont. Unifont contained those glyphs originally, and they had to be pulled out because of the licensing issue.
I reasoned that if Koreans had created Hanterm, they probably had derived an acceptable minimal number of variations for each letter when combining them into syllables.
There was no English documentation that I could find on the Web explaining how the Hanterm fonts were organized, so I studied Jungshik's Perl program and added some comments to it to help myself understand it better. I also shared my thoughts with native Koreans to get further insight into why the letter variations were formed the way they were.
You can see the fruits of that labor here:
http://www.unifoundry.com/hangul/index.html
and here:
http://unifoundry.com/hangul/hangul-generation.html
I wound up spending five years off and on with native Koreans going over those glyphs to get something that they considered acceptable. The end result is still not absolutely perfect, but it was at a point of diminishing returns. So I wrapped up work on those glyphs and used them to create the Hangul Syllables Block that is in Unifont today.
Only having a row height of 16 pixels made the effort extremely difficult. If the glyphs had been 24 pixels tall, it would have made a world of difference. But that is not what I had to work with.
So what you suggest is something that could be implemented in a TrueType font with mapping to kerning pairs that is beyond the capabilities of Unifont. Such a font would have to be created by someone who was well versed in the many nuances of Hangul syllable formation. There was a point where I understood enough that I could have created a new Hangul font that was 24 pixels tall, but only by using multiple variations of each glyph. However, I do not think I will put in that level of effort for Hangul again. If someone Korean is interested in creating a new set of glyphs to distribute under the GPL, that is something I could help get off the ground but it would be a different font than the current Unifont.
Paul Hardy
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