2013-10-22 21:38, Jean-François Colson wrote:
I know that in some Japanese encodings (JIS, EUC), \ was replaced by a ¥.
Some encodings indeed have “¥” U+00A5 YEN SIGN assigned to code point
0x5C, to which Unicode assigns “\” U+005C REVERSE SOLIDUS. This is
external to Unicode as such, though it of course affects mappings
between Unicode and other encodings.
On my computer, there are some Japanese fonts where the characters seems
coded following Unicode, except for the \ which remained a ¥.
Yes, that applies to MS Mincho for example. This is mentioned at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backslash
Is that acceptable from a Unicode point of view?
No. Clause D2 of the standard on p. 65 says:
“Character identity: The identity of a character is established by its
character name and representative glyph in the code charts-
[…]
• Consistency with the representative glyph does not require that the
images be identical or even graphically similar; rather, it means that
both images are generally recognized to be representations of the same
character. Representing the character U+0061 latin small letter a by the
glyph “X” would violate its character identity.”
Although there can a lot variation in the glyphs for “\”, it is clear
that rendering it as “¥” violates the requirements.
Are such fonts Unicode considered compliant?
If a font has a glyph like “¥” set to correspond to code point 0x5C, we
can either say that it is not Unicode encoded or regard this as data
error in the font. But the practical impact is that people using such
fonts may get misled to input a character that they expect to be the yen
sign but is actually, in coded representation and when processed by
programs or displayed using other fonts, the backslash.
Yucca
