G'day [Tomohiro KUBOTA (Re: [I18n]ISO 10646 Fonts and XFontSet question) writes:] >> At Mon, 1 Oct 2001 15:00:23 +1000 (EST), >> Jim Breen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> > I heard comments to that effect several times in the last 12 months. Not >> > from up-to-date computer-literate people, but from linguistics people >> > who had been influenced by the nonsense that had been said and written. >> >> I imagine the discussion is not that "they are forced to use Chinese glyph" >> but that "they don't have way to distinguish Japanese and Chinese glyphs".
Actually some of each. I recall an impassioned speech from someone senior at Kokken about how Unicode should have separately encoded the Japanese and Chinese sets, because he couldn't see any other way of distinguishing between the glyphs. >> This discussion is right and wrong. We have now "language-tag" but I >> don't know any products which implements language-tags. Except at the level where the user selects the entire set of fonts. Yes, we haven't reached the stage where Chinese and Japanese can be easily mixed in a document and displayed/printed with the appropriate glyphs. >> Anyway, not only Unicode but also JIS are obviously insufficient for >> serious literature purpose. JSC/JSA clearly consider they have no brief to pursue all the kanji used in (past) literature. This is something that annoys scholars who want to digitize old texts. Since the original Han unification was using essentially modern characters sets, the ~14,000 traditional characters that turned up in Unicode 1.0 did not help the scholars much. The massive sweeping in of additional ideographs in 3.1 offers some real potential, but with an expected long lag before useful fonts emerge, the realization of the potential could be long away. >> However, I think XFree86 doesn't need to >> support such serious usage. What? And say to serious literature scholars that Linux and X is never going to support them? >> Average Japanese people will be satisfied >> if Japanese text is written in Japanese glyphs. Non-negligble number >> of Japanese people can read or are studying Chinese and/or Korean and >> they need to read Chinese and Korean in Chinese and Korean glyphs. >> I think this level of support is adequate for XFree86. Of course. 99.9% of people are happy with JIS X 0208 Level 1. >> > There are still the die-hards, and the BTRON people, but they are >> > doomed, I hope. >> >> Sorry, they are not doomed. New versions of BTRON are released every >> a few years and they are sold well in reality, though I don't have. BTRON itself is alive, and has carved out some interesting niche application areas I understand. It was the "Ultra-Kanji" activity at Toudai that I think is ultimately doomed. Cheers Jim -- Jim Breen [[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/] Computer Science & Software Engineering, Tel: +61 3 9905 3298 P.O Box 26, Monash University, Fax: +61 3 9905 5146 Clayton VIC 3800, Australia $B%8%`!&%V%j!<%s(B@$B%b%J%7%eBg3X(B _______________________________________________ I18n mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/i18n
