At 7:32 PM +0100 12/17/02, Marco Cimarosti wrote:
There was an earlier proposal by the Chinese for a pre-composed Tibetan set (ISO10646-WG2-N964) that I analyzed in Jan 1994. It had 708 character stacks.Once the Tibetan BrdaRten characters are encoded in BMP, many current systems supporting ISO/IEC10646 will enable Tibetan processing without major modification.
It was believed to be from a PC hardware card-based implimentation that the Chinese posts & telegraph department had early on and was for supporting colloquial Tibetan plus a bit extra (transliterations of foreign place names, etc.). The 1994 proposal document was dot matrix printed and contained some hand-drawn glyphs, indicating that the PC implementation of that time could not support some chars.
Presumedly the present proposal of 900+ stacks is a maturation of the same system. And the claim for universality is based on it being able to typeset everything they have published to-date. The question is whether that list of texts is representative of the full literary and linguistic corpus or is only a sub-set?
Could the Chinese be asked to provide detailed information on this system and the texts that it has published so we can get an idea of the domain that their stack set covers?
Peter Lofting
