On Wed, 20 Mar 2002, John Cowan wrote: > Dan Kogai scripsit: > > And as for Chinese, how do you tell whether Traditional or Simplified > > is more appropriate? > > Traditional and Simplified characters are *not* unified in Unicode, > (BTW, this should go on the list of Unicode Myths), > so that would be up to the author, not the browser.
That's true, but you still can't distinguish preferred glyph variants of mainland China from those of Taiwan (nor those from that of Japan, either). cf., the often-cited U+76F4 and U+9AA8. What is often claimed as a difference between "Japanese" and "Chinese" is misportrayed and/or misunderstood as a difference between Japanese language and Chinese language practices, but is really a difference in national glyph preferences, e.g., U+9AA8 is often said to be a case where "Japanese" and "Chinese" differ, but this is true only when comparing the glyph preference of Japan (not Japanese language) and mainland China, and false if compared to Taiwan. I think this might be what Dan was referring to. BTW, there are some people who would've preferred to have traditional and simplified Chinese characters unified, so that conversion may be performed by "changing the font". e.g., Founder (sorry, don't have the url at the moment) has some fonts which come in "J" and "F" versions. The "J" versions are perfectly normal in being Unicode fonts with simplified Chinese characters. The "F" versions, however, are a different story--although they are also Unicode fonts, at the codepoint for a simplified Chinese one actually finds the glyph for its traditional analogue (in most cases). Thus, one can store master data in simplified Chinese, and generate what appears to be traditional Chinese by changing the font (and making a few minor edits because of lack of 1-to-1 correspondence). e.g., type U+56FD with the "J" font, change the font to the "F" version and you see the glyph for U+570B, but its still really U+56FD. Certainly, this sort of thing can't help improve understanding that simplified and traditional Chinese characters are not unified in Unicode. Thomas Chan [EMAIL PROTECTED]
