On Fri, 25 Oct 2002, Marco Cimarosti wrote:
> 1) Assigning arbitrary glyphs to some Unicode characters. E.g., assigning > the "$" character to long S; the ASCII letters to Greek letters; the whole > Latin-1 range to Devanagari characters, etc. There are several Japanese and Korean fonts with exactly this problem that are shipped with MS Windows. As is well known, at U+005C they have glyphs for Yen sign and Won sign instead of reverse solidus. IMO, MS is trying to solve a well-known problem of 'Yen/Won vs reverse solidus' in a totally inappropriate way(a font-hack !) . Nobody would argue that reverse solidus and Yen/Won signs are identical. However, what these fonts do is exactly that. Just switching fonts suddenly turn all reverse solidus to Yen/Won signs. MS-Windows has to provide distinct ways to enter 'reverse solidus' and 'Yen/Won' sign (both full-width and half-width) in Japanese and Korean IMEs. It must be very easy to modify their IMEs that way. In Japanese and Korean input mode, pressing the key marked with 'vertical bar, Yen/Won' (this marking also has to be changed to have three 'vertical bar, reverse solidus and Yen/Won in a diff. color') should generate 'Yen/Won' sign (half-width/full-width version can be controlled the same way as for US-ASCII characters. Both Japanese and Korean IMEs in MS Windows offer this run-time configurable option) while in non-Japanese/Korean mode (usually English) they should generate 'reverse solidus' for the key. Somebody may argue that this would be problematic because there are a lot of old documents in traditional/legacy encodings (Shift_JIS/CP932 and CP949) that use 0x5c for Yen/Won sign. There's no easy solution other than some heuristics combined with manual correction for this problem. This conversion has to be done for all old documents. It may be painful and time-consuming to life the degeneracy between 'reverse solidus' and 'Yen/Won sign' (in financial documents, most of them must be 'Yen/Won sign'. In TeX/LaTeX, most of them must be 'reverse solidus'), but it has to be done at some point and it's better to do it early than later. After that, there should be no old documents/data with this problem IF MS Windows stops tacitly promoting its users to produce documents with U+005C meant for Yen/Won sign by shipping hacked-font mentioned above. Another argument against this change may be that it's quite inconvenient to toggle between EN mode and JA/KO mode when typing a long file path(in Japanese and Korean) with a lot of path separators (U+005C in MS-Windows) embedded. Well, most Windows users rarely type file paths directly. For a small number of users that do type them often but do not type currency signs as often (another group of people that need this option is TeX/LaTeX users, perl/shell/etc programmers), JA/KO IME can have another run-time option, whether or not hitting the key labelled with 'reverse solidus/veritcal bar/Yen/Won' always produce 'reverse solidus'. Jungshik Shin
