On Sun, 21 Jan 2001, ha shao wrote: > On Sun, Jan 21, 2001 at 03:54:09AM -0700, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > On Sun, Jan 21, 2001 at 06:17:32PM +0800, ha shao wrote: > > Normally standard organizations (international, national or industrial) > > do not publish their standards for free. That's why you can rarely find > > any formal standard on internet. You should be able to buy the published > > gb18030 standard from "the publisher of China standards". > > Yes, but... It is China and it's a national standard. They are > paid by the government funding. As a Chinese, I really hope > that the archivement of any government funded researches should > be free to use for at least China citizens... okey, when national > security related matter are not included. anyway, the standard > is not from some non-profit organization. The work is paid > by the government and the government is paid by the people. > And it is internet era. The original work should be in electronic > form. It's not like put a electronic copy will really a big cost. > > Now, even unicode 3.1 is online. It used to cost a bundle.
That should say "3.0", but I get your point. US $50 is a lot of money. (Actually, the Unicode 2.0 book was about US $62, and not even hardcover! But I think the paper was better.) But US $50 is nothing compared to the several hundred dollars (!) that ISO was charging for their ISO 10646 standards, and you get even less information--mostly just pictures of the glyphs, and the bulk of them are the CJK ones. The Unicode book has more informative text to read. Plus I can get the Unicode book from a regular bookstore or Amazon, without having to deal with Switzerland (iso.ch) or whatever one's local national standards organization is as a middleman. No wonder Unicode has had more influence and effect over people. (For several hundred dollars, I'd rather buy the _Hanyu Da Zidian_, which is about US $300 from usipusa.com for an 8. vol hardcover fanti edition on nice paper--yes, I did buy it last year. :) Or perhaps a Taiwan printing of Morohashi, or even the real thing from Japan if I ever save up enough... Then I can read about what all those CJK glyphs are!) ISO has since dropped their prices, but its still more expensive. There's a cd-rom PDF version now too (also more expensive), but poorly put together. Thomas Chan [EMAIL PROTECTED]
