My impression: you need at least basic kanji characters (plus the two
kanas and the Western European characters). You can probably leave off the
wide equivalents of Western characters. Ditto Cyrillic and Greek
characters. You may wish to consider eliminating the "wide" kana
characters.
Numbers in Japan are represented with the same characters we use in the
USA.
Dates can be represented numerically, but you should use the
"day" "month" and "year" symbols (kanji).
Times are numeric.
Names are tough: many Japanese names use lesser-used kanji or specialized
(even custom) characters. Total support for names is a problem area (I
doubt you'll allow users to design their own kanji characters).
That said, I believe that Japanese users will understand a limitation to
the Shift-JIS range (the JIS X 0208 standard).
Other text fields should support the basic kanji (at least). But the
additional storage isn't that much: why not support all of the kanji
characters? Then you won't have to revisit this issue (until you add
Chinese)...
Not to ramble too much, but if you support text entry from outside your
device (and you appear to), you will see a large proportion of the kanji
range coming at you. Printing empty black squares is not very consumer
friendly in this regard ;-)
Although you regard your application as simple, I submit that limiting the
range of kanji you support (if you allow external entry of any kind) will
result in confusion from users, who do not memorize which grade level they
learned a particular character in and won't understand why this common
character works and that one doesn't.
Regards,
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 Mon, 17 Jul 2000 michael.w.martin1@kodak.com wrote:
>
>
> From: MICHAEL W. MARTIN
>
> Again, thanks to all those who have provided information on the Japanese
> character subset of Unicode.
>
> For a device that will print a relatively basic label (such as sequence
> number, date, time, name, department, etc) onto a document in Japanese --
> what is your consensus? Basic Kanji+Hiragana+Katakana.... or will
> Hiragana+Katakana or just Katakana suffice?
>
> Thanks!
> Mike
>
>
>
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