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Here are the consolidated answers to the original questions from
Richard Birch (richard_birch.wgc1@rx.xerox.com):

For various reasons, I have been asked a number of times what are the minimum
dimensions required (in pixels) for displaying foreign characters.  Does anyone
already have information about this?

It seems to me that an appropriate answer must be broken down into a matrix.
Across one side would be the following:
1.	what is the minimum height and width needed in pixels to represent
characters comfortably
2.	what is required for a cramped, yet still acceptable display
3.	what is the absolute minimum requirement in order to create readable
text.

I am a proponent of the idea that products should be internationalised so that
they can support any language in the future.  However, since in the short-term
I have to live in a non-ideal world,  I expect that it would be sensible to
define minimum requirements on the basis of the type of script being enabled.
This would provide for the other headings on the matrix.  Potential headings
which come to mind are:
-	requirements for Latin characters (including East European languages,
such as Czech with its accents over capital letters)
-	requirements for Cyrillic (eg. the Russian 'zh' and 'shch' probably
require a lot of width)
-	requirements for Arabic (with its 's', and ligatures which stretch far
above and below the baseline)
-	requirements for Chinese characters and Indian characters which have
considerable internal complexity
etc.

Does anyone:
1.	have any ideas on grouping the information sensibly
2.	have any answers to fill in cells of the resulting matrix.


Jeff
INSOFT-L List Manager

*========================================================================*
 Jeff Bowyer                         EMail:
 Computing Center		     jbowyer@cis.vutbr.cz
 Technical University of Brno
 Udolni 19, 602 00 BRNO
 Czech Republic
*========================================================================*


Sender: Alexandre Khalil <iskandar@u.washington.edu>

> -	requirements for Arabic (with its 's', and ligatures which stretch far
> above and below the baseline)
> Does anyone:
> 2.	have any answers to fill in cells of the resulting matrix.

  On IBM-PC and clones, EGA(43lines) uses 8x8 characters which are
confusing, EGA(25 lines) are 14x8 and readable.  With the 16x8 of VGA,
the characters become almost pretty.
  Macintosh and MS-Windows use variable size characters, but those that
are acceptable are of size comparable to EGA(25 lines) -14x8- or larger.


Sender: Chiaki Ishikawa (pmcgw!personal-media.co.jp!ishikawa@uunet.UU.NET)
        Personal Media Corp.  Tokyo, Japan

Regarding CRT display:
For Japanese (including Kanji) I think, IMHO,
A few years ago,
Answer to 1. : 16 x 16.
Answer to 2. :  IMHO, 16x16 is already cramped as is.
		But 14x14 may be acceptable to techies, i.e., those
		who can accept sub-standard display.
		Remember that number of pixels less than or equal to
		16x16 produces incorrect character shape, especially
		for Kanjis.
Answer to 3. : 24 x 24 and more.
		Nihon IBM created its own version of PC that uses
		24x24 since they figured that pixels at least this
		large was required to display Kanjis correctly!

Today, I doubt that any consumer would accept anything below 24x24 as
acceptable, however, for a small display of PC or X-window, 16x16 is
still widely used.
However, even  for CRT display 16x16 would be considered minimum now
that a large 17inch monitors are being used by serious users of PC:
people in publishing business are using 17inch or larger nowadays.

(I do understand that there is a trade-off between the # of pixels and
the cost, but the cost of hardware is dropping fast enough to use
higher resolution for better display.)

As for priting, even back in 1980, someone at Fuji XEROX [sibling
company, I think] told a visiting American Professor H. Stone, who I
talked to later on campus, that Fuji Xerox had already produced 80x80
for printer and anything less was considered non-professional job.
(Well, they apparently talked about professional printers.)

But, then again, already Japanese consumer wordprocessors (PC-like hardware
with wordprocessing software and dedicated printer) now boast of
more than 40x40 pixels (with jaggy elimination)  and more resolution
for the printer each passing quarter.

It seems that 32 x 32 may be considered a luxury for Roman alphabets,
but for a today's working Japanese 32x32 probably the minimum number
of pixels that produce characters on a paper that looks normal.

With 24x24 pixels, I think good dot matrix printer can generate letter
quality documents for, say, English. Well, at least comparable to documents produced on
a poor quality typewriter. After all, the first generation dot matrix
printer produced legible characters with 8x8 pixels!
However, for japanese processing, even with 24x24, I could tell that the
Japanese characters were produced on computer equipment, and this
distracts my attention much. Nowadays, I can't tell the difference
between a professionally printed document and a letter printed on my
YHP DESKJET 300J ink dot printer at a cursor glance.
(I think DESKJET 300J has 300dpi resolution.) Of course, I can tell
the difference when I closely look at the printed page, but I have to
mentally concentrate to tell the difference now.

I think the answer all depends on how much quality you expect in terms
of trade off decisions concerning the cost: this may differ much among
engineers and generel population.

At least in Japan, the pursuit for higher pixels, i.e., aesthetics
seems to win over the cost issues since the cost of font roms and the
(formerly) expensive printer heads have steadily been decreasing due
to the popular demands.
Yes, I think the demand for aesthetics have produced acceptable
printers today.


Sender: Glenn Adams <glenn@metis.com>
        Technical Director, Unicode Consortium

If by "foreign characters" you mean "non-English characters," then the answer
is probably around 48x48 pixels according to recent discussions which took
place between AFII (Association for Font Information Interchange) and a number
of important font vendors in East Asia.  Some have suggested that 32x32 would
suffice; however, there are certain quite complex CJK ideographs containing
as many as 64 strokes which would be hard pressed to be fit into 32x32 in a
legible manner.