On Sat, 3 Feb 2001, Markus Kuhn wrote:
> Tomohiro KUBOTA wrote on 2001-02-03 03:20 UTC:
> > I, a native Japanese speaker, cannot recognize Chinese version at all.
> > (I don't know average Chinese people can recognize Japanese version.)
>
> We have been told here repeatedly that Japanese readers are well known
> to be particulary picky about precise glyph shapes, whereas Chinese
> readers are rather tolerant and find even many Japanese fonts just as
> acceptable and readable as Chinese fonts.
Yes, Chinese readers are more tolerant, and recognize more variant forms,
whether they be caused by divergence between the typographic standards of
Taiwan and post-1950's China, or between print and handwritten forms[1].
Often, you can find differences even between the body and indices of a
single book.
[1] e.g., the "a" you see in a typical serifed font is not what you would
use in handwriting, although both will appear in printing, and people
subconsciously treat the two as variants of the same. Basically only a
small community of IPA users need to make the distinction because they
denote different vowels, and even then not very sucessfully because they
are so used to equating them.
Consider this example (http://www.dynalab.com.hk/new/Standard_Kai.htm)
of print (grey) vs. handwritten forms (white). These are in a different
font (kaishu)--which is not what is used in either Unicode or ISO
publications--and the example is from Hong Kong, but there are just as
many examples of differences between Japanese printing and handwriting.
When I studied Japanese, all of my teachers, before ever seeing our
writing (whether we had a background in writing Chinese or not), would
lecture on points to be careful of--the angle of strokes, the point of
intersection between two strokes, the length of strokes, etc.
> Recommended reading:
> Otfried Cheong's essay on Han Unification in Unicode:
Unfortunately, I don't think this will change the opinion of people who
have a narrow tolerance for variation. There are essays out there which
promote the opposite view, too.
All this does is change the issue from a technical one about writing
systems and the appropriate measure to take when encoding them in a
universally-used character set, to a political one which boils down to
(in general) Westerners and Chinese supporting it, and Japanese not.
The faction defending Han Unification should really be doing more arguing
why it is the "right" thing technically, irregardless of whether or not
Chinese support it.
Thomas Chan
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels
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