Re: The result of the plane 14 tag characters review.

From: George W Gerrity (ggerrity@dragnet.com.au)
Date: Thu Nov 14 2002 - 06:06:58 EST

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    At 23:28 -0800 2002-11-13, Doug Ewell wrote:
    >George W Gerrity <ggerrity at dragnet dot com dot au> wrote:
    >
    >> The problems occur first, because the code scanner can no longer be
    >> stateless; second, because one needs to provide an over-ride to
    >> higher-level layout engines; third, because it can't solve problems
    >> where multiple glyphs exist, whose use is highly context-dependent,
    >> as is the case for some Japanese texts; and fourth, because there is
    >> no one-one translation between the (largely) non-unified simplified
    >> and traditional characters in Chinese.
    >
    >Careful on that last point. The Chinese vs. Japanese glyph problem has
    >nothing to do with the simplified vs. traditional Chinese character
    >equivalence problem. In particular, Unicode makes no attempt to unify
    >"equivalent" SC and TC characters, because such equivalence is not
    >1-to-1 except for a few thousand relatively basic pairs; plus the
    >equivalence would only be valid for Chinese, not for other languages
    >that use Han characters (Japanese, older Korean, Vietnamese nôm).
    >
    >SC and TC characters are completely non-unified, unless you want to
    >count the few that are the simplified forms of some character and also
    >the traditional form of some other character.

    That is exactly one point as to why there is no simple solution:
    Simplified and Traditional weren't unified. I apologise for not
    stating it more clearly. Moreover, although I am a tyro in Chinese,
    and only know Japanese from a dictionary, I have come across several
    dozen Japanese forms that are the equivalent simplified forms used in
    Mainland Chinese: these pairs are not unified.

    George



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