Re: Subset of Unicode to represent Japanese Kanji?

From: addison@inter-locale.com
Date: Fri Jul 14 2000 - 15:58:03 EDT


It is if the display has to be replaced with a higher-resolution part, has
to meet a minimum font size (by law), has to be backlit, has to run for
twelve hours NOT JUST THE DISPLAY but also a sophisticated medical pump
pumping exact amounts of drugs. High(er) resolution backlit displays are
power hogs.

The size of the ROMs isn't so much of an issue as is the other
specific. But I did point out the ROMs because hardware designers will
appreciate the issues involved... just a little more
processor/RAM/ROM/display/keypad/form factor change would make it about
right... but at the expense of other design factors. I mean, really: a
Palm Pilot is just nothing next to one of these pumps, and it'll recognize
Japanese *handwriting* for Pete's sake.

The batteries were a valid excuse, this time.

Addison

=======================================================
Addison P. Phillips Principal Consultant
Inter-Locale LLC http://www.inter-locale.com
Globalization Engineering & Consulting Services

+1 408.210.3569 (mobile) +1 408.904.4762 (fax)
=======================================================

On Thu, 13 Jul 2000, Gary Roberts wrote:

> I have a wrist watch with far smaller than AA batteries. It supports all
> of JIS X 0201 and JIS X 0208 (Shift JIS encoding) with extensions.
> Batteries are not an excuse.
>
> *
>
> On Thu, 13 Jul 2000 addison@inter-locale.com wrote:
>
> > This is the eternal debate of embedded systems developers. Their displays
> > won't handle the complex characters, and they can't seem to get enough ROM
> > to store all of the characters.
> >
> > I did a project a few years back in which we had to produce the bitmaps
> > for ONLY the characters ACTUALLY USED in the translation of the UI. Now
> > there's a limited repertoire!
> >
> > If you intend to support Japanese for a consumer application, supporting
> > only kana is maybe *worse* than nothing: you will look like ugly
> > Americans compared to your Japanese competitors. Kana is a good solution
> > in specialized applications where users may understand the limitations. I
> > worked on a handheld medical device powered by two AA batteries a couple
> > of years ago and kanji was out of the question: two AA batteries won't
> > power a big enough display and the ROM to store the bitmaps for very long.
> >
> > I'm just guessing from Michael's signature, but if what you're trying to
> > do it put text on the back of photos, print text on Picture CDs and other
> > kinds of consumer operations, then you will be doing yourself no favor in
> > supporting only kana.
> >
> > Regards,
> >
> > Addison
> >
> > On Thu, 13 Jul 2000, Antoine Leca wrote:
> >
> > > I am NOT a Japanese speaker (I can only poorly read kana, and with help).
> > > So here is my supplementary question.
> > >
> > > foster.feng@ni.com wrote:
> > > >
> > > > Japanese document must consist of:
> > > ^^^^
> > > >
> > > > hiragana: less than 100 characters
> > > > katakana: less than 100 characters
> > > > kanji: basic kanji has 6,879 characters as defined in JIS X 0208-1990
> > > > extended kanji has 6,067 characters as defined in JIS X 0212-1990
> > >
> > > You mean, extended kanji is an absolute requirement for any device which
> > > intended to dislay some Japanese text?
> > >
> > >
> > > > Technically, a Japanese document can be written in all Roman characters, but
> > > > this is not a true Japanese document.
> > >
> > > I understand easily that this is _not_ the solution (it always needs me quite
> > > some times when I see my name written in kana or Cyrillic or whatever).
> > >
> > >
> > > But: What about a document written only with kanas, without any kanji?
> > >
> > > I know this is far from perfect, that it will hurt (or upset?) the reader
> > > quite a lot, and will reduce his reading speed to about a small fraction of
> > > normal, perhaps a tenth (but that's much better than romaji, anyway).
> > > But is it practical, for example for a small display? (say, 3 lines of
> > > 20 characters)
> > >
> > >
> > > Regards,
> > > Antoine
> > >
> >
> >
>
>



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:21:05 EDT