On Thu, 4 Oct 2001, Tomohiro KUBOTA wrote:
> At Mon, 1 Oct 2001 07:32:45 -0400 (EDT),
> Jungshik Shin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> > > Problematic, yes, but is must be addressed cleanly and effectively.
> > > Arguments over glyphs have bedevilled the acceptance of Unicode in the
> > > CJK countries, and you still hear people in Japan saying "Unicode
> >
> > Please, drop 'K' here. You may even drop 'C'. Most Koreans, if not
> > all, do NOT care. Unicode has been perceived as 'the way' to go not
> > only for multilingual use but also for Korean alone in Korea.
When I asked Jim to drop 'K' here, what I meant
was that Unicode is not bedeviled in Korea because of arguments over
glyphs. Jim was making a classical mistake of lumping together CJK
where they cannot be lumped together (needless to say, there are lots
of shared characteristics) and I wanted to point it out. I didn't mean
issues arising from glyph variants across CJK countries and/or across
different fonts need not be addressed at all. I agree to his statement
that 'it must be addressed cleanly and effectively' (if only because
Japanese care a lot.)
I know that in Japan that has been a subject of heated debates, but in
Korea that was simply not the case. Unicode was *hailed and accepted*
( rather than bedeviled ) as the way for the future (especially to
overcome the *deficiency* of 'bedeviled' KS C 5601/KS X 1001). Some
Koreans somewhere could/might have an issue with CJK unification in *fine
details* such as which ought to be unified and which ought not (just as
IRG members have wrestled for many long hours of their service), but they
never raised their voice either because they're ignorant of computing in
general or Unicode in particular or they thought advantages of Unicode
far outweigh a very minor disadvantage due to CJK unification. Whichever
is the case, a simple fact stands that Unicode was NEVER bedeviled in
Korea because of CJK unification.
> Then, do you think that C and K people will agree that daily default
> fonts for Unicode Han Ideogram adopt Japanese style glyph? If yes,
> Japanese people will be happy.
Having written the above, do I have to answer your question? :-)
If you really want an answer, my answer (for Korean) would be probably YEs
and no. YEs: Firstly because we don't use that many Chinese characters
in our daily life (approaching zero) so that it doesn't have much effect
even if there's a big issue with glyph variants. (Even some newspapers
still using Hanja in print version do not use Hanjas in on-line version)
Secondly, I, like many other Koreans, am pretty familiar with glyphs
variants, whether Japanese or Chinese, if they can be called that way,
having seen them used in Korean books and newspapers. Thirdly, most
characters that could stand out possibly odd to Korean eyes are NOT
unified with characters familiar to Koreans.
I did a little experiment with Asahi (www.asahi.com) web site and
UTF-8 xterm. I copied several pagefuls of Asahi article, pasted
it to 'vim' running within UTF-8 xterm (launched with '-fw
misc-fixed-*-ko-*-iso10646-1' option) and saved it to a file. Then,
I launched another UTF-8 xterm with '-fw misc-fixed-*-ja-*-iso10646-1'
and displayed the file in both xterms. Needless to say, glyphs in two
fonts are not identical, but the difference is mostly 'language-neutral'
to my Korean eyes (that is, where there's a difference between glyphs,
I cannot pick which one is from -ja- font and which is from -ko- font
because both glyphs are used in Korea and I, myself, use either of them
at the whim of my fingers/hand/pen) that it became hard to tell which
is which after a few shuffling of two xterms on the screen.
I also looked thru tens of pages of the Chinese character chart included
in the ISO 10646 CD-ROM. Unlike Unicode 3.0, ISO 10646 lists 5
glyph variants (PRC, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam) for each
character. Time and again, I have to scroll up the page to remind me
which column is for which country/region (I kept forgetting that there
are two fields for China). Sometimes, glyphs listed for PRC, Taiwan or
Japan are more familiar to me than glyphs listed for Korea (which means
that the opinion of Korean representative to IRG as to representative
Korean glyphs for those characters are different from mine).
This is certainly from my Korean point of view and I do respect
different point of views held by Japanese and that's why I fully agree
that glyph variants should be handled efficiently and cleanly.
no: No is much weaker than yes. This is NOT a question of 'right' and
'wrong' to Koreans but a question of more or less pleasing to eyes.
Presumably, Japanese fonts are designed to look nice with Hirakana and
Katakana while Korean fonts are designed with Hangul in mind.
Simply put, what has to be avoided, if possible, is mixing glyphs from two
totally different fonts designed with very different design principles.
And, this is the case regardless of CJK unification and is not limited
to East Asian text.
BTW, you may want to visit the dictionary of Chinese character variants
(edited by Mandarin Promotion Council, Min. of Ed., ROC) at
http://140.111.1.40
Jungshik Shin
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