Hi, 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". This discussion is right and wrong. We have now "language-tag" but I don't know any products which implements language-tags. Anyway, not only Unicode but also JIS are obviously insufficient for serious literature purpose. However, I think XFree86 doesn't need to support such serious usage. 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. > 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. > Fortunately the CJK arena seems to be the only one where national glyph > styles are so important. Imagine if we had to provide French-looking > alphabetics, Yiddish-looking Hebrew, Korean-looking hanja, Saudi-looking > Arabic, Uttar Pradesh-looking Devanagari, etc. etc. all in the one font > file. Software developers just have to try to meet the real demands. CJK glyph distinction is a reality. (Even this is an opinion from a specific viewpoint. Some think that they are different _character_ and Unicode unified different _characters_. This distinction of viewpoint comes from the distinction of viewpoint about what is glyph and character, which is ambiguous for CJK Han Ideogram.) On the other hand, your "imagination" is mere an imagination and against the reality. --- Tomohiro KUBOTA <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.debian.or.jp/~kubota/ "Introduction to I18N" http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/intro-i18n/ _______________________________________________ I18n mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/i18n
