Re: Unicode & Han

From: Michael Everson (everson@indigo.ie)
Date: Sun Aug 11 1996 - 10:51:10 EDT


Huang wrote:

>[I] hope the day will come very soon so that I don't have to find out that
>some characters I want and must use (such as a character for a given
>location or in someone's name) is not in the Unicode and no place to
>turn for solving the problems in an urgent situation (such as writing an
>invoice). As a chemist, I already find that the characters for the
>elements above 100 or so are not in the Unicode character set.

The non-Unicode Apple Chinese software I have allows you to create bitmaps
of your own characters.

>So, from what you said which "character" got in Unicode depended on who
>put them in. Well, I hate to be Chinese now, because our representitives
>failed us badly.

I cannot comment on this. Life is long. Participate in the work!

>If you feel that I told you that you don't respect our culture, please
>accept my apology. I don't mean that personally. In fact, you are a
>better Chinese than I am -- I don't know how to play wei-chi and cook
>Sichuan style.

How did you know I liked Sichuan food? But unlike Glenn I don't speak
Chinese -- I've had to learn how to read Han characters and use Chinese
software in order to typeset some Chinese text. You can see how well or
badly I did in a paper I wrote on encoding the Yi script
(http://www.indigo.ie/egt/standards/yy/n1187.html)...

>In my understanding on the character coding issue, there is already an
>existing American National Standard, EACC -- ANSI Z39.64, used by the
>libraries worldwide. Why, then, putting so much efforts re-inventing the
>wheel? The originator of the EACC, the CCCII already compiled 75,684
>ideographic characters (in 1989). Why couldn't we start from that and
>support that? Wasting precious resource is not one of the things a
>Buddhist should do.

"Come and look at this world. It is like a royal painted chariot wherein
fools sink. The wise are not imprisoned in the chariot." (Dhammapada 171)

We have what we have. We work to improve it.

Regards,

--
Michael Everson, Everson Gunn Teoranta
15 Port Chaeimhghein Íochtarach; Baile Átha Cliath 2; Éire (Ireland)
Gutháin:  +353 1 478-2597, +353 1 283-9396
http://www.indigo.ie/egt
27 Páirc an Fhéithlinn; Baile an Bhóthair; Co. Átha Cliath; Éire



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