On Thu, 4 Oct 2001, Jungshik Shin wrote:

>> Arguments over glyphs have bedevilled the acceptance of Unicode in the
>> CJK countries, and you still hear people in Japan saying "Unicode

> 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

  Let me just give you some examples. Korean Language Institute (under the
arm of Ministry of Education of ROK) web site at http://www.korean.go.kr
almost exclusively uses UTF-8. KS C 5601/KS X 1001 based encoding such
as EUC-KR simply cannot work for their purpose because they have to put
up a lot of modern and old Korean literatures which have modern Hangul
syllables, Old Hangul syllables,  and a lot of Chinese characters not
representable/not included  in KS C 5601/KS X 1001.  Only Unicode/ISO
10646 offers 'the' standard (as opposed to proprietary) way to represent
them. All three major word processors for Korean, MS Word 2000/XP,
Arae-Ah Hangul (Hangul Wordian) and  Hunminjongum, support Old Hangul
with Unicode U+1100 Jamo block. Korean MS Windows XP also comes with the
built-in support for Old Hangul with U+1100 Jamo blocks and I believe
fonts and the input engine for Old Hangul will eventually be released to
non-Korean version of MS-Windows XP users.  MS IE 5.5/6.0 also support
this. Mozilla has some support for Old Hangul, but it will follow at least
under MS-Windows once a new input API for Windows XP (code name 'cicerro')
is digested by mozilla developers.

 Input method should not be hard under X11, but a much tougher issue to
tackle is how to make dynamic on-the-fly glyph shaping work and how to
make the freely distributable minimal set of fonts that work with glyph
shaping infrastructure. I think Robert Brady's Pango_Ligature_Hack can
be extended to deal with U+1100 Hangul Jamos. However, that's only for
bitmap fonts.  (Korean) linux developers have a very long way to go to
catch up with MS Windows 2000/XP in this aspect.

   Jungshik Shin


_______________________________________________
I18n mailing list
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/i18n

Reply via email to