Highsmith on Glyph Space

[Jongseong]

John: As you say, fine-tuning the most common 2,350 already gives you a huge number of potentially modular elements.

Yes, and maybe even all the elements needed for the syllables possible with modern Korean jamo (the individual consonant and vowel letters).

But this model is not extensible to additional jamo, such as those used in old Korean, in obsolete transcription systems for foreign sounds (such as 1953's Deuronmal Jeokgibeop of the Ministry of Culture and Education), in the system for writing Sino-Korean used in the Dongguk Jeong-un (1448), and the vowels ᆞ and ᆢ used for writing the modern Jeju dialect. These are particularly ill-served by typography, as everyone understandably balks at the prospect of having to design thousands of more syllables. Only a few hangul fonts support all the 11,172 syllable combinations of modern jamo as it is.

Digital technology and the encoding of hangul jamos separately in Unicode was supposed to make supporting these additional jamos easier, but fonts have not caught up at all. Even the very few fonts that support old Korean only support attested syllables and encode them using the Private User Area. Not surprising since, if I'm counting correctly, there are 124 × 94 × 138 = 1,608,528 possible syllables that can be encoded by Unicode.

The following image was taken from this Microsoft typography page on developing OpenType fonts for Korean.

The individual jamo elements all exist in modern Korean, but none of the particular combinations (initial consonant, vowel, final consonant) is in use in modern Korean. For the composition described on the Microsoft page to be correctly implemented using the ccmp, ljmo, vjmo, and tjmo OpenType features, each of these combinations ㅂㅅㅌ, ㅗㅒ, and ㄹㅁㅎ have to be designed for their appropriate context. You couldn't use any elements from the 2,350 most common syllables or even the 11,172 syllables of modern jamo for this, because these are some of the most obscure combinations, not in use in modern Korean. You could probably count on one hand the number of fonts in existence that can display this syllable. I'm not even sure that New Gulim, the font which I think is used for the above illustration, actually supports this syllable; the sample could have been put together for illustrative purposes, for all I know.

If we had parametrizable jamo, then it should be easy to compose the above syllable using existing elements for modern jamo. This is not something that can be done with the current model.

I realize that the applications I am talking about are very specialized. Maybe extended Korean is the only writing system for which the model I am talking about makes sense. But there are many writing systems and styles in existence, and there is a chance the model could be beneficial if not necessary for some of them as well. It could be just my mathematical background speaking in terms of finding a general solution, even if the existing limited solution suffices for 99% of our needs.