[Fontconfig] Why do asian fonts contain greek glyphs?

[mpsuzuki at hiroshima-u.ac.jp]

Hi,

On Wed, 28 Sep 2005 15:56:07 +0100
Simos Xenitellis <simos74 at gmx.net> wrote:
>have Greek glyphs and they get matched, before FreeSans gets the chance. 
>These Asian fonts appear to be double-spaced(?) and display Greek in a 
>way that native Greek speakers are not used to; it looks terrible.

It's because Japanese traditional charset (JIS X 0208:1983, JIS X 0212,
JIS X 0213) includes Greek characters, and encodings based on those charset
(iso-2022-jp, euc-jp, ms-kanji and its families) includes them.

As you've pointed out, Greek characters in JIS charset is NOT for native
script. In Japan, usually they are used as mathematical symbol, instead
of writing Greek text. I think, Japanese people prefer native Greek fonts
to see Greek text, if it's available.

In addition, JIS charset includes Cyrillic characters. Some Chinese and
Korean charsets were influenced by Japanese charset and include Greek
and Cyrillic glyphs.

I think, Greek characters in Asian charsets should be treated as 
"Fullwidth Latin Chars" (http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/UFF00.pdf).
But Unicode.org didn't assign special code points for them, so it's
a bit difficult to exclude fixed-fullwidth-Greek/Cyrillic in Asian
fonts automatically. Some intelligent mechanism might be required to
do that.

Regards,
mpsuzuki