More questions about how the Koreans do it

From: m_wolf@richsun.cpg.trs.reuter.com
Date: Thu Oct 27 1994 - 07:52:17 EDT


From: NAME: Misha Wolf
        TEL: + 44 171 510 6722
        ADDR: London, England <M_WOLF@AM@REC>
To: NAME: ISO10646 LIST <in%"richsun!uunet.uu.net!JHUVM.HCF.JHU.EDU!ISO10646"@rcssob@mrgate>,
        NAME: Unicode <in%"richsun!uunet.uu.net!unicode.org!unicode"@rcssob@mrgate>,
        NAME: Unicore <in%"richsun!uunet.uu.net!unicode.org!unicore"@rcssob@mrgate>

Many thanks to K Kim and to Ken Lunde for very helpful answers to my initial
question (let us call it Q1) which was:

| Can anyone explain how Korean vendors currently (ie pre-Unicode) encode
| the 11,172 Hangul syllables using two octets?

Prior to asking my follow-on questions, I'm reproducing K Kim's reply as it
did not reach some of the mailing lists concerned (Ken Lunde's reply reached
them all):

| msb (bit) of MSB (Byte) is 1. the reaming 15 bits are divided into
| 3 regions, each having 5 bits. 5 bits can accommodate 32 cases.
| there are 19 syllable-initial modern chars;
| 21 syllable-peak and 27 syllable-final chars.
| one fill chars is used to indicate that a syllable does not have
| a syllble-final char.
| since 32 >= max (19, 21, 28), this scheme can accommodate all of
| 11, 172 syllables.
| of course, it does not folow ISO 2022.

Q2: In the encoding scheme described above, are the Jamos numbered from 0 or
from 1?

Q3: Given that 19+21+27+1=68, why does the BMP contain approximately 350
Korean Jamo characters (256 in the region 1100-11FF and 96 in the region
3130-318F)? What is the correspondence between the 68 Jamos mentioned above
and the 350 Jamos in the BMP?

Q4: Does Korean IT use ASCII? If yes, does it use fullwidth ASCII? Does it
use halfwidth ASCII?

Q5: What other characters are in general use within Korean IT? CJK
ideographic characters? CJK punctuation characters? Other CJK characters?

Thanks.

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