This topic returns so frequently that I am going to start counting
how many times I will hear about it on this list in the year 2002.
For now,
CJK_Unified_Ideographs_is_not_good_for_font_selection_topic_counter = 1
There got to be a FAQ on this subject somewhere.
It is quite common that a Chinese character can be written in
different form and there is no such thing as what is absolutely
the right form and what is the wrong form, although elementary
school teachers always insist that students should use what is
considered "correct" form.
The variation may be quite subtle such as a stroke should be a
little bit longer or shorter ("dian3" or "na4"), or can be quite
dramatic as the two forms can be totally different. Unicode
standard has to balance between the two extremes as which form
should be given a unique code point and which forms
should be just given one code point and treat them as glyph
variation. When they are doing this, they try to make sure
character forms have different code points within a national
standard always have different code points in Unicode. So
a text written in one language shouldn't have any problem.
The problem arises only when a multi-lingual text is encoded
in Unicode. Then the problem is not just for CJKV. A English
text with French phrases in it has the same problem. One solution
to the problem is using tags.
--
Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels
Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
