What follows is HunMinJeongEum EonHae, a vernacular translation of HunMinJeongEum (The Correct Sound for the Instrcution of the People). It began with the announcement that a new script had been invented by King Sejong to help his people express their thoughts, which had been difficult or impossible because Chinese characters used until then were not suitable for Korean. After this brief introduction, it explaines the sounds of 17 consonants and 11 vowels with examples.

This page was put up to test U+1100 Hangul Jamo support by web browsers, which is essential for pre-1933 orthography Korean text. All Hangul syllables, modern(post-1933 orthography) or pre-1933, are represented using Hangul Conjoinging Jamos at U+1100. I edited this file with Vim 6.1 with a very simple patch under Xterm 166. Xterm-166 and Vim 6.1 can stack up up to two combining characters over a base character. In this scheme, Hangul leading consonants are base characters while medial vowels and trailing consonants are combining characters. This is very similar to the way Thai script is supported by Xterm and Vim. Both programs make use of Markus Kuhn's implementation of wcwidth.

Because there was no Korean XIM server that supports input of U+1100 Jamos, yet, I had to make a keymap file for Vim to enter Jamos. The keymap file used is available here. Xterm was launched with PARK Won Kyu's Korean iso10646-1 font. This font has glyphs for U+1100 Hangul Jamos. In the font, glyphs for Hangul Jamos are arranged in such a way that they form a syllable when stacked over each other. The screenshot of my editing session is here.

Recently, a new input method for Gtk2 based programs, imhangul has been developed. This is a great news for Linux and other Unix-like OS that uses Gtk. For details on imhangul, refer here.

You can find a PDF version here typeset by Karnes Kim with LaTeX. I made another PDF version using Lambda and OGulim.ttf (available as a part of Middle Korean support tool for MS Word 2000)

The following combinations of browser and font can render this page as intended:

• Mozilla for Unix/Linux with PARK Won Kyu's zero-width iso10646-1 font. Please, note that this font(uhdalsam) is different from the font mentioned above (xuhdalsam) In this font, glyphs for leading Jamos are spacing/advancing while glyphs for medial and trailing vowels are non-spacing/combining (zero-width). This change is necessary because Mozilla doesn't do any sophisticated rendering of U+1100 Hangul Jamos as is done by Xterm-16x. (You can refer to the section 'Thai rendering concerns' in an excellent summary of Thai support by GNU/Linux/X for the difference between two fonts.) Here's a screenshot of of Mozilla rendering the page. Please, make sure that you remove Hanterm Johab fonts from your font path because one of them will take a precedence over PARK Won Kyu's font if they're present. Hanterm Johab fonts have limited coverage of Middle Korean Jamos leading to an only partially correct rendering of the page.
• Mozilla for Unix/Linux with James Kass' newest version of CODE2000 font(my great thanks goes to James for making this possible). You have to turn on the direct truetype font access in Mozilla by following the instruction by Brian Stell. The screenshot is available here.
• Mozilla for Unix/Linux with Xft patch with the aforementioned CODE2000 font. RedHat Linux (7.3? or later) is shipped with a version of Mozilla patched by Chris Blizzard to make use of Xft and fontconfig by Keith Packard. It has a problem with U+115F(Hangul Choseong Filler) and U+1160(Hangul Jungseong Filler), both of which have to be rendered as blank, the former being spacing and the latter being non-spacing. Mozilla with Xft patch renders them both with a spacing hollow box. The screenshot taken by CHA Young-Ho is available here. A work-around is add U+115F and U+1160 to the list of blank glyphs in fonts.config file of fcpackage.
• Mozilla for MS Windows 9x/ME/NT4/2k/XP with CODE2000 font. I haven't tested it under Windows 9x/ME, but it should work. The screenshot of Mozilla rendering the page under Windows 2000 is here. You have to note that there's a little problem with Hangul Jungseong Filler(U+1160). It's rendered as a question mark instead of being rendered as a non-spacing blank glyph. I filed a bug for this issue at bugzilla and came up with a patch. See bugzilla bug id 167136. With this patch, Mozilla under MS Windows has no problem rendering the page.
• MS IE 6 under MS Windows 2k/XP with CODE2000 font. MS IE 5.x may also work, but I haven't checked it out. The screenshot is here.
• Opera under MS Windows 9x/ME/2k/XP with CODE2000 font. James Kass confirmed that Opera is able to render the page correctly under MS Windows 98 and I believe that it should also work under Windows 2k/XP.
• MS IE 5.x/6.x under MS-Windows with fonts for pre-1933 orthography Korean (with necessary OT tables) should have no problem rendering pre-1933 orthography Korean syllables, but reportedly it wouldn't render modern(post-1933) Korean (I'm well aware that W3C standard specifies that html documents be in NFC, but I think that requirement imposes an undue burden on the authors of html documents. I believe the normalization should be done by web browsers, instead.) Unfortunately, I don't have any opentype font with necessary opentype tables to confirm this. It'd be nice if anyone with such fonts (Korean version of MS Office XP comes with a couple of them) could test the page with MS IE 6 and send me a screenshot.
• When my patch for Mozilla is checked in, Mozilla for Unix/Linux/X11 and Mozilla for MS Windows can render pre-1933 Korean text with very high quality fonts developed by Hanyang system in Korea. There are three bugs filed at Mozilla's bug site. They're 176315, 177877, and 176290. Here are a few screenshots taken with my patched version of Mozilla.
  • Mozilla-Window with Ogulim font
  • Mozilla-X11 with Ngulim font
  • Mozilla-X11 with Ogulim font
  • Mozilla-Xft with Ngulim/Ogulim font