From: "Allen Haaheim"
... it seems that "[s]ince GB18030 is fully ISO 10646 compatible, it readily supports CJK Extension B and other languages." I don't have the GB18030 font or Extension B Charset in my machine. Can I load CJK Extensions A and B without switching to XP? I would prefer to use Win2000, or the ME which I am running now, but if necessary I can use XP.
In terms of CJK glyphs, the GB 18030 character set only includes the CJK Ideographs and CJK Ideographs Extension A blocks. In terms of encodings, it supports the Supplementary Ideographic Plane (and thus CJK Ideographs Extension B), but no SIP characters are currently defined in GB 18030. So the "SimSun 18030" font that comes with the GB 18030 support package is not a misnomer: it does contain the complete character set.
Windows 2000 will do, but you must have Office XP. I have Windows 2000 with Office XP with the 2002 Proofing Tools installed. The extended font is called "SimSun (Founder Extended)" [filename: SURSONG.TTF] and contains around 64,000 CJK Ideographs: most of Extension B, but not all. I have access to this entire font via the Simplified Chinese "Enhanced Unicode IME" which has already been mentioned, via the UTF-16 code (not the scalar value).
From: "Allen Haaheim"
I tried what you suggested with unipad, but for some reason it went to a location on a PUA character map, rather than CJK Unified Ideographs Extension B, where they are in fact located.
It goes to a PUA location because that is where that character is located in the appropriate CHANT font. The two examples you gave go to E596 and E58E, as has been noted. The correct characters are in the "ICS1" font. I would be curious to know how many of the glyphs in ICS1 are now in Unicode, and which are not. ICS3 has a very nicely and accurately rendered set of oracle-bone and early bronze-inscription characters, by the way.
Regards, Eric Rasmussen
