Re: [tlug] Re: Unicode

[Thomas Piekenbrock <thomas.piekenbrock@example.com>]

 >> I am creating such a dictionary, and I can tell you that it is *not*
 >> necessary to create a separate code point for every minor variation
 >> in character form, since these differences can easily be represented
 >> by font changes.

 > How do you do this?  If the same document contains 2 characters with
 > the same code point how do you specify that one should be displayed as
 > a Chinese character and the other as a Japanese character?

First: Differences are on the level of aesthetics, e.g. Kusakanmuri with 
3 or 4 strokes?
Using one Unicode font with "Japanese flavour" and one with "Chinese 
flavour" solves the problem. Regarding the fact that Japanese prefer 
Minchotai (=Songti in China), while Mainland China uses Fangsongti a 
lot, you may want different fonts anyway. Otherwise, if a mixed document 
is for Chinese people, it is often ok to have the whole stuff with 
Chinese flavour, because that is what you see mostly anyway with 
Japanese text printed in China.

Within a 2-byte font you cannot have a Japan version, a Korea version, a 
China version, a HK version and a Taiwan version for every 
Kanji/Hanzi/Hanza.

There are a lot of Latin fonts in comercial PC installations which look 
awfully foreign to me as coming from the German way of writing. But it 
is my freedom to select one which I like.

Why does Unicode make sense?
If you ever experienced Mojibake, you know.
If you ever went through the pain to test interoperability of SW 
supporting zillions of coding schemes, you know.

I do hope that some day I will see no more JIS SJIS EUC ISO-2022, 
GuoBiao, Big5, etc. encoded emails and web pages.

Mobile phones from global manufacturers such as Nokia are going with 
Unicode as the standard encoding. Already now.

Thomas Piekenbrock