Jungshik Shin writes:
> I find it hard to believe that it's as hard for most Japanese to
> recognize it as you claims. If it's indeed the case, how could they
> enjoy the art of calligraphy where a lot more glyph variants with
> much more prominent differences in shape from the 'average' glyphs
> are used?
A person can assimilate and ignore as much shape differences as (s)he
is used and trained to assimilate and ignore. It's like this in other
areas as well: Some people listen to the birds all day and can
distinguish the singing of many birds. Others never train it and never
get the ability.
Another example is German Fraktur. If I had not learned to read and
write it in school in 1975, 33 years after it was officially
abolished in Germany, I would have as much problems reading Fraktur,
as Tomohiro has recognizing "chinesely written" characters.
So why the flames? I think the conclusion is already clear:
1) Let Japanese users use Japanese fonts. Unicode 3.0 is OK for
Japanese users who don't need to mix Japanese and Chinese.
Technically this can be done using locale dependent configuration
and resource files.
2) For perfect typesetting and display of multilingual text, use the
language tags. They are present in the next version of Unicode 3.1
and ISO 10646, so we have to support them.
Bruno
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Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels
Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/lists/
