Hi,
At Sat, 07 Apr 2001 17:18:03 +0100,
Markus Kuhn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I never insisted on unification of Japanese and Chinese glyph styles.
I am glad to agree this point. Please let's stop discussing on
Han glyph unification.
> I have personally absolutely no interest either for or
> against Han glyph unification. I do not use the Han script, therefore
> the question whether Han glyph unification is good or bad has never been
> any of my personal or political business.
Surprising! I have believed that you are one of strongest advocates
for Han (character) Unification.
> I also said that Han coded
> character set unification is a technological requirement before Han
> glyph unification can become possible at all.
This is true. However, if you don't want to insist Han glyph
unification, please stop to say such a thing. We easily think
that you actually insist Han glyph unification from such a sentence.
> While I do not care about Han glyph unification, I do care a great deal
> about the usefulness and simplicity of the plaintext infrastructure that
> we provide with POSIX implementations.
I admit that simplicity is one of important things.
This is why I don't like Han character unification. However,
I know Han Unification is determined policy of Unicode and
is not likely to be changed in future. Thus, some complexity
will be inevitable to properly handle Han characters.
Thus, IMO, we should stop the discussion on whether Han Unification
is good or bad and we should discuss about how CJK glyph distinction
is acheved based on Han character unification. (How can proper font
be choosed? How can the font choosing mechanism avoid to be a
vaporware?)
> This was possible thanks to the hardwiring of TCL strings to Unicode!
For many years, TCL/TK supports Unicode as internal encoding but
it does not support XIM input. This is why we use Japanized local
version of TCL7.4/TK4.2 (or quick hack of TCL8.0/TK8.0) even now.
We sometimes observe that some software is advertised to support
Unicode but it actually fails to work conveniently with Japanese.
(I thought you use TCL/TK and other Unicode software with Han Ideogram.
Now it is revealed that you don't use Han Ideogram and it is natural
you don't know about such daily inconveniences.)
> The Unicode language tags are a bad compromise intended mostly
> to help stubborn Japanese ISO 2022 fans
The fact we need multiple glyphs for one Han character has no
relation to ISO 2022.
I don't stick to language tag if our need is satisfied that proper
font can be selected according to language of text. However, we
need some standard to do so before Unicode will become popular in
CJK world. Do you have any idea for alternative?
(We will need some more labors such as fixing conversion tables
between Unicode and local encodings, concept of width, and so on
before we can use Unicode as one of popular encodings. Otherwise,
we cannot even start to use Unicode.)
---
Tomohiro KUBOTA <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
http://surfchem0.riken.go.jp/~kubota/
"Introduction to I18N"
http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/intro-i18n/
-
Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels
Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/lists/
