[tlug] Missing kanji [was: japanese encoding question]

[Larry Stanbery <lstanber@example.com>]

On Wednesday, February 25, 2004, at 12:38  PM, David Oftedal wrote:
> At least Unicode has all the needed kanji these days...

(Carefully keeping in mind threading, etc. =)

I have a question about that.  I recently was told by a Japanese 
coworker that there are some kanji, apparently derived from 
handwriting, which don't appear in the standard fonts/glyphs.  
Unfortunately, I can't given an example, except that it's similar to 
ones in Unicode as well as in SJIS, etc.  A specific example is a 
person's name, and it deviates from the norm (a "variant glyph", I 
suppose).

The current solution to handle this, on a M$ box, is to create the 
glyph by hand, map that to an unused character, and it then shows up on 
screen, in print, but only for that particular M$ box.  This is, 
unfortunately, a bit difficult to handle when moved into a 
collaborative, distributed environment, across multiple platforms.

My specific problem with this is that I've got a UTF-8 database, 
web-driven, into which this glyph should be entered.  And, yes, it has 
to be that specific glyph.  My current thoughts are that there has to 
be some sort of mechanism by which a "new" glyph could be created and 
shared across systems, without editing a font or something, but I'm at 
a loss for exactly what might be done.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.  My current inclination 
is to toss all of the kanji out the door and use Romaji, but I expect 
that would be a Bad Idea. =)

- - - - - - - -
Larry Stanbery, RHCE
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