[KS] unicode

[Charles Muller]

On 2015/05/30 11:25, Otfried Cheong wrote:

> Japan, on the other hand, is still very sceptical of Unicode,
> and apparantly the fonts lack these compatibility code points (even
> though the cost for including them would have been close to zero, as
> it's simply a mapping to an already existing glyph).  So when you format
> using the Japanese font, it seems that a compatibility mapping is
> applied, mapping the compatibility code points to their equivalent
> Unicode ideographs.

This was the situation approximately a decade ago. Japan has long since 
embraced Unicode (I served as a Japanese representative committee to the 
Unicode IRG for Han ideographs, so have ample experience with the 
process) and is deeply involved in all major policy and glyph encoding 
decisions.

Although early Unicode committees were some times forced to treat such 
ideographs as 遼 and 遼 as separate codepoints based on demands from 
members of national bodies who did not understand the distinctions 
between problems related to the differences between the concepts of 
glyph/character/codepoint/font (i.e., it was not the members of Unicode 
who didn't understand these issues--it was the representatives of the 
national bodies of Korea, Japan, and so forth), these issues are being 
largely resolved nowadays through the development of variant planes that 
are embedded in the operating systems themselves, and also found in 
state-of-the-art text searching functions.

Thus, for example, a Google search for a certain variant will usually 
yield results containing other variants. The SAT Taisho Text database 
also employs these variant planes.

Regards,

Chuck

---------------------------
A. Charles Muller

Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology
Faculty of Letters
University of Tokyo
7-3-1 Hongō, Bunkyō-ku
Tokyo 113-8654, Japan

Office Phone: 03-5841-3735

Web Site: Resources for East Asian Language and Thought
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