On 6/5/97 10:27 PM Unicode Discussion (unicode@unicode.org) wrote:
>Not me, but Jenkins wrote:
>> E.g., the official "Taiwanese" glyph for U+8349 ("grass") per ISO/IEC
>> 10646 uses four strokes for the "grass" radical, whereas the PRC,
>> Japanese, and Korean glyphs use three. As it happens, Apple's LiSung
>> Light font for Big Five (which follows the "Taiwanese" typographic
>> tradition) uses three strokes.
>
>Kai-hsu Tai quoted and replied:
>> They are not different characters! The distinction between the 3-stroke
>> and the 4-stroke variants are pretty much like the two kinds of LATIN
>> SMALL LETTER G's in Times New Roman and Helvetica, one somewhat looking
>> like "8", the other somewhat like "9".
>
>Yes, I know that they are the same character, but Table 6-25 in TUS 2.0
>(Ideographs Unified) does not seem to mention this case... the closest
>case it seems to come to is "different writing sequence," but whether or
>not this includes an "increase in the amount of strokes" is unclear. The
>example they give, $B<~(J, has the same amount of strokes* in both
>examples.
>There is also no example for "variations of a radical."
>
Well, then, we'll have to add one. :-)
>The fact that it's a very common variation/simplification, and that it's
>kind of special in that the simplification involves a stroke count
>change, I think it should be mentioned in Table 6-25 so as to better
>clarify exactly where the boundary between "typeface" and "abstract
>shape" is.
>
I'm cc-ing errata@unicode.org so that we can make this change.
>I agree with you in that they're they same character and its a typeface
>variation that belongs on the "Z" axis, but it's not uncommon for people
>to get upset when they insist that the proper way to write their surname
>is with the four stroke U+8279, insisting that it's not the same
>character and is not the same as the three stroke. So the more specific
>the charts are, the better prepared TUS is for the future.
>
Yes, people can get very sensitive about their names -- I can imagine
what would happen at a UTC meeting if people started talking about Jon
Jenkins, Jo Becker, Glen Adams, Marc Davis and the ever-popular Murry
Sergeant. :-)
And yet -- do people really insist that the three- and four-stroke forms
are different characters? Or just that they don't write it that way? I
will freely admit that "Jon" is a version of my name -- just not the way
I spell it.
The charts deliberately avoid printing all the acceptable typographic
variations for a given Unihan character for a number of reasons, the main
one being to keep down printing costs. One of the motivations for
putting the Unihan database on the Web is to partially overcome this.
At the same time -- and particularly so far as the personal name issue
goes -- I'm not aware of anybody who has done a definitive survey of all
the glyphic variations that people insist on. Certainly I'm not aware of
any way that we could provide that data.
=====
John H. Jenkins
jenkins@apple.com
tseng@blueneptune.com
http://www.blueneptune.com/~tseng
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