Dan Kogai wrote: > On Thursday, March 21, 2002, at 04:02 , Doug Ewell wrote: > >> John Cowan: > >>> Traditional and Simplified characters are *not* unified > in Unicode, > >> > >> Some characters, e.g. '一' (one), are used in *both* Traditional and > >> Simplified Chinese. The characters that are used in *both* systems > >> are indeed unified. > > > > Then there is no problem deciding which glyph to use, right? > > Wrong. Try "People", For example. > > Japanese: > http://kanji.zinbun.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~yasuoka/cgi- > bin/kanjibukuro.cgi/char/JIS-2916/UCS-8846/KYOIKU > Simplified Chinese (PRC): > http://kanji.zinbun.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~yasuoka/cgi- > bin/kanjibukuro.cgi/char/GB-5458/GBK-D6DA/UCS-4F17/JOYO > Traditional Chinese (ROC): > http://kanji.zinbun.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~yasuoka/cgi- > bin/kanjibukuro.cgi/char/CNS1-5C38/BIG5-B2B3/UCS-773E/JOYO
<ByTheWay> These links don't work for me (even after re-joining the spit lines). However, the code of the three Unicode characters appears in the URL, so I looked them up for the convenience of those who can read UTF-8: - U+8846 (衆): Japanese - U+4F17 (众): simplified Chinese - U+773E (眾): traditional Chinese </ByTheWay> I don't follow your point. These are three *separate* Unicode characters, so I don't see how there can be any glyph issue. Han Unification is said to cause a glyph issue when the *same* Unicode character has different shapes in Chinese and Japanese. In this case, if the character is displayed with a Chinese font, it would have an inappropriate shape for Japanese readers. <ByTheWay> But I fail to see why this should be an issue. The solution seems very simple: Japanese computers should use Japanese fonts! It is not surprising that Japanese looks weird if typeset with a font designed for Chinese. Also Italian looks weird if typeset with a Chinese font: the accented letters à è é ì ò ù look horrible in "pinyin style" (particularly à and ò, which are hardly distinguishable and, thus, may cause confusions between the 1st and 3rd person of the future tense). Moreover, the apostrophe has to much white space on the right side, so that "l'apostrofo" looks like "l' apostrofo" (which is a spelling error). But, again, the simple solution is not using Chinese fonts to typeset Italian. </ByTheWay> > As you see, Simplified Chinese is not just "Simplified" > but a complete reinvention of the whole character. That is often the case. And that's a big nuisance for all people trying to learn Chinese. But I don't see how it is an issue for Unicode or for Japanese users (OK, apart those studying Chinese, of course). As already said, Unicode does *not* unify "simplified" and "traditional" characters. So, it will never happen that you get a beef noodle on your face by changing the font of a document. _ Marco
