Glenn Maynard wrote on 2002-05-10 18:17 UTC: > It wouldn't help people that actually > need to *use* the Yen symbol, since there'd still be no way to input the > real single-width yen symbol, though it might be possible to add that to > the input method.
Don't Japanese keyboards have two different keys for the backslash and the yen, just like the British keyboard has two separate keys for the � and the # (which also used to share the same code position in ISO 646-GB and ISO 646-IRV, but fortunately only in a time before Microsoft was around and able to cause trouble :)? The only long-term solution out of this mess is pure Unicode. Use proper Unicode fonts where U+00A5 is a (single-width) YEN and U+005C is a backslash, and (you normally should never need it) U+FFE5 is the FULLWIDTH YEN SIGN. Of course you can't just continue to use old keyboard input methods with Unicode. They will have to be adjusted to the new repertoire, just like we still have to figure out for English how to adjust keyboards and keyboard entry methods to give us access to non-ASCII Unicode characters such as directional quotation marks and HYPHEN, MINUS, EN DASH, EM DASH. Forget about the Shift_JIS and EUC_JP tradition and start to think in a context, where character semantics is completely and exclusively defined by Unicode. You will loose a few double-width characters (such as doublewidth Cyrillic and double-width block graphics), and you will discover that it is perfectly possible to write nice Japanese plaintext files nicely without any of these. For old files, people will surely come up with ever smarter and smarter conversion tools, but in the end you will at some stage have to decide manually whether a character is a yen or a backslash, and that is a good thing, just like people who migrate from ASCII have to decide whether a HYPHEN-MINUS is a HYPHEN or a MINUS. Markus -- Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/> -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
