Unicode Imcompatibilities on Windows 95/NT

From: Kazuhiro Kazama (kazama@ingrid.org)
Date: Mon Jan 05 1998 - 08:23:03 EST


Recently, many japanese programmers reported imcompatibilities of
Unicode used by Microsoft Windows 95/NT.

As a result of my tests, I found that microsoft uses his own encoding
conversion scheme.

For example, "WAVE DASH" of JIS X 0208 is converted to "WAVE DASH"
(U+301C) of Unicode ordinarily (Ex. JIS X 0221 = ISO/IEC 10646). But
Windows 95/NT converts it to "FULLWIDTH TILDE" (U+FF5E).

And "MINUS SIGN" of JIS X 0208 is converted to "MINUS SIGN" (U+2212)
ordinarily. But Windows 95/NT converts it to "FULLWIDTH HYPHEN-MINUS"
(U+FF0D).

These differences of encoding conversion produce imcompatibilities
between different unicode-based systems (Ex. Windows and Java).

Microsoft may want to use "Halfwidth and Fullwidth Forms" area. But
Windows 95/NT are rich text system and they can design appropriate
glyph size and width fonts easily.

Why microsoft uses non-standard encoding conversions although it
produces imcompatibilities? Are these bugs?

Kazuhiro Kazama (kazama@ingrid.org) Ingrid Project



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