On Sat, 16 Mar 2002, Dan Kogai wrote: > For instance, there are at least 31 (official) way to spell 'Wata' of > Watanabe, a very popular Japanse family name. Only a couple of which is > in JIS0208-1990, one of many charsets Unicode based upon. Well, in this
This does not necessarily mean that only a couple of variants for 'Wata' is in Unicode. Understandably, JIS 0208-1990 had to limit the number of variants forms of any given Kanji partly because its code space is limited. Unicode/ISO 10646 has a far wider coding space than JIS 0208-1990 (94x94 coded character set) and it now has almost 10 times as many Chinese characters(Hanzi/Kanji/Hanja) as JIS 0208-1990. Of course, having ~ 2^21 code points available does not give IRG a greenlight to encode any variant without unification issue. > situation. There are so many Watanabe-sans, Saito-san, and others whose > name cannot be spelled in Unicode. and any of Japanese character sets, right? Can you give a few examples after checking out Kanjis not just in BMP but also in plane 2? > Dan the Man whose Name was Compromised by the Japanese government (*) > > (*) My parents wanted me to name me �� (U+5F48), a classical form, but > it was not listed on "the table of Kanjis allowed for names" so I was > named U+5F3E. Frankly speaking, I find it rather hard to understand what difference there is between using U+5F48 and using U+5F3E in spelling your name. They're the same character with the same meaning but with a bit of variation in shape. However, I should be careful because this is about one's name. Jungshik Shin
