On Tue, 10 Aug 1999, Lucas, Gerald wrote:
> Does anyone know what the difference is, if any between Hangul and KSC for
> Korean. The more general question is whether font type (i.e. GB or Big 5
> for Mandarin) is synonymous with a Unicode script? If not, then what the
> difference is?
This is a question about rather basic knowledge which can be most
thouroughly gathered from Ken Lunde's book "CJKV information processing",
published by O'Reilly.
Hangul (or Hangyl) is a syllabic script created about 1500 A.D. It is
nowadays the most important subset of the set of all characters that are
used for Korean writing. Other subsets are Hanja (Chinese characters) and
western alphanumeric characters. All these together are organised into
one large character set called KSC, which is the South Korea Standard
Character set, that can be encoded through ISO-2022, EUC or other encoding
schemes, but not through Unicode.
What KSC is for Korea, GB is for mainland China and Big5 is (roughly) for
Taiwan. Unicode, does not encode any of these sets, but there are
conversion tables that allow converting back and forth without loss of
information.
I am not sure how closely related the Hangul subsets of KSC and Unicode
are. Probably conversion between them is even simpler than in the case of
chinese characters (Hanzi, Kanji, Hanja), since no unification had to be
done. Even the North Korean KPS has large parts in common with KSC.
-phm
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