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