“They said: Come, let us make a city and a tower, the top whereof may reach to heaven; and let us make our name famous before we be scattered abroad into all lands.” The work was soon fairly under way; “and they had brick instead of stones, and slime (asphalt) instead of mortar.” But God confounded their tongue, so that they did not understand one another's speech, and thus scattered them from that place into all lands, and they ceased to build the city. Genesis 11:1-9. Since the fall of the Tower of Babel, finding methods of communicating with different languages and their associated writing systems has been a challenge.
With the onset of worldwide globalization, overcoming this challenge has become paramount. However, there are complex cultural differences between nations that have prevented a fully integrated global society. In the computer industry, these differences cause problems with international cooperation due to the tethers of multi-language display and interchange.
One step toward meeting the challenge of a multi-national computing industry was the Unicode Consortium formed in 1988, which developed a global character identification standard. The goal of the consortium was to develop a standard that allows a unique identification of characters for every language. The consortium developed the Unicode Standard, now in version 2.1, available from Addison-Wesley Developers Press 1997, (available at http://www.unicode.org).
Unfortunately, being able to print and display a character from a choice of many languages is only a small step toward meeting the international challenge. An issue of equal and oft times more importance is the layout of script, the characteristics of fonts, and the general requirements of text that make text readable. However, typefaces and script forms of current languages are different, eclectic and do not follow the same rules. For example, a typical English font, Times New Roman, follows a typographical formula that is uniquely Roman based wherein line height is typically set to be 120% of the size of the font in points. Terminology is based on Roman characters. The concepts of Roman type include a base line, a cap height, an ascender height, a descender height and line height.
Written languages do not follow the same rules for font characteristics such as a default line length or typeface. Rather, each language and script is culturally derived from a different basis. For example, some Asian scripts use glyphs that are pictorially derived and other Asian scripts read from right to left and are symbolically derived. Even within the same language, scripts and fonts do not follow a predetermined characteristic formula. Finding a formula for determining default font characteristics seems an impossible task. Rather than finding a formula appropriate for all languages, graphic designers have relied on visually altering line length, typeface and line heights, altering each script such that a rendering is pleasing to the eye and meets readability requirements known to the graphic designer.
Currently, there is no solution for determining font characteristics that applies to all known scripts. Every script is culturally derived and has a different basis and completely different concepts. Even if a formula worked for a particular script in a particular language within each script, there is not a linear relationship to many characteristics of the script. For example, any changes to font size or line length in the same script require changes in line height that take into account readability. Graphic designers typically visually alter line length, typeface, and line height. Longer lines of type require more line height for readability. Also, the size of a font is relevant to line height, but a larger font does not require the same line height as a smaller font.
Because there is no linear or obvious relationship between line height, line length and changing font sizes, many computer applications require manual changes. Further complicating the layout issues, graphic designers do not know the rendering device of type due to the plethora of rendering computing machines. A typed page designed for a web page, for example, can be rendered on any size screen, leaving the optimum reading sizes for line length, line height and font size as an unknown. What is needed is a method for automatically determining those characteristics that currently require a graphics designer. An automatic method and system that can compute readability parameters, such as line height, font size and line length is needed so that text can be rendered on any display, in any language and in any size without manual adjustment.