Unihan is designed, first and foremost, to be a _data_ file for consumption by software. It doesn't matter at all how many spaces are used for the tabs. The use of tabs make it trivial to write scfipts to parse the file with grep, awk, Perl, Python.
With regards to the Pinyin orthography: tone numbers make it easier to process the readings into initial, final and tone. Replacing the numbers with diacritics makes it more difficult to do this. -- Tom Emerson Basis Technology Corp. Software Architect http://www.basistech.com "Beware the lollipop of mediocrity: lick it once and you suck forever"
