On Fri, Jan 11, 2002 at 05:29:50PM -0600, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > >It's not going away, and the most reasonable fix is Tomohiro's: pretend > >they're two glyphs of the same character. If we know the language, we > >can choose yen symbols for Japanese, and backslashes otherwise. > > But this won't work in 99% of the systems out there. You have to assume > that most systems won't do anything with the language information, because > they won't. Hence, if you want the Yen symbol, use the Yen code, not the > Backslash code.
You have to assume that most Japanese systems will display \ as a Yen symbol, because they wlil. Now, translation tables for CP932 on these systems could translate backslash and the yen symbol both to the yen symbol; that way, other people would see what that user saw, and that user will get yen symbols back. But then you break round-trip; when you go back to CP932, you don't know whether it was originally a backslash code or a yen code. And that will cause lots of people to complain and do something far more annoying: put CP932 directly into tags, and that's the worst possible evil. So the compromise would be to store CP932's backslash-yen-character as a Unicode backslash, and store the fact that it's Japanese text; then the option exists to display it as a Yen symbol. (The problem here is that Japanese users using "clean" Unicode are forced to mark real backslashes as English, even in Japanese text, to make sure they're not displayed as a backslash.) There is no ideal solution, and your "purist" solutions have practical problems. You can't force "correct" solutions on people when they have practical problems--it won't work, they won't do it, the solution fails and you're probably in a worse spot than you were to begin with. The best solution I could see is Unicode adding a variant of \ for the yen symbol, and letting people use the variant selector to select it. Encode CP932 \ to that variant. -- Glenn Maynard -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
