On Thursday 10 January 2002 03:03 am, you wrote: > Yen vs \ is the best example of "unification" I've seen yet (even > though it's not *quite* the same thing.) My terminal uses MS > Gothic (a Japanese font), and all backslashes show up as yen > symbols for me. It's extremely ugly, and I'd much prefer to only > see yen symbols where they're intended (even if it's in a filename > or something equally "dumb".) It's reasonable to expect something > simple (not just a typesetter or word processor) to be able to > distinguish them.
We can already distinguish them, except for the absence of backslash in these miscoded fonts. Backslash and Yen sign have Unicode codepoints. If programmers would use them correctly (which some Japanese refuse to do) and we could discard the miscoded Microsoft fonts, there would be no problem. > Unfortunately, language tags are no solution here. They're fine > for things like Ogg tags, where it's a single unit of information. > They're not useful at all for terminals, where you need to be > stateless. (It's not reasonable to expect everything to > automatically send a "JA" language tag when sending Japanese text, > and to know to reset it when processes are suspended and resumed, > and so on.) If it was possible to attach a variant selector for > it, it'd be completely usable--if your locale is "en", and you want > to output a yen symbol, output \ selecting that "variant". > (Japanese people might want the opposite and it wouldn't hurt to > tag all \ characters.) It still wouldn't be possible to put a yen > symbol in a DOS filename, though. You have to decide whether you are in stateless plain text or stateful formatted text. You can't have both. Plain text cannot have language tags. If you are using tagging, you should use a standard form of tagging like XML, and get all the rest of its benefits. > (Unfortunately, Microsoft Japanese fonts don't *have* a > single-width backslash *at all*, which means terminal > emulators--which typically don't want to deal with multiple > fonts--are hard pressed to do anything like this at all. Grrr.) These broken fonts must be replaced. That is the only way to get proper display of Japanese using Japanese fonts in Unicode under Windows. Unfortunately, they exist because some Japanese claim that they are *necessary* for proper display of Japanese in Unicode, which is nonsense. -- Edward Cherlin [EMAIL PROTECTED] Does your Web site work? -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
