A question about fonts

[Andersen, Jan]

It is not entirely obvious what you want to accomplish.  Are you writing
an application that displays text?  Then any sane modern toolkit should
handle the problem for you.

=========================

Hi Eirik,

No, no, nothing as ambitious as that. I have a problem when I study Chinese: there are many good dictionaries, but the electronic ones invariably assume that you have the text in electronic form, and the paper one are big and bulky. The texts I read are printed on paper, and I find the best index method is the radical based one; but it makes the lookup cumbersome for obvious reasons. So, I have gone to the Unicode Consortium, downloaded their CJK related data, formatted it somewhat, loaded it into a MySQL database, extracted a huge-ish set of static web-pages that I can now use to look up characters using a radical index on a computer; I can then use an electronic dictionary to give me the last step. It is actually quite handy, if not excessively elegant, but some characters come up as blank squares. There is a pair of fonts (called han-nom for some reason) that seems to cover a large part of the interesting range, and I wasn't aware that Fontconfig can help me there, allegedly. So I am going to learn about Fontconfig now.

/jan