RE: Precomposed Tibetan

From: Thomas Chan (tc31@cornell.edu)
Date: Wed Dec 18 2002 - 13:11:25 EST

  • Next message: Andrew C. West: "RE: Precomposed Tibetan"

    On Wed, 18 Dec 2002, Marco Cimarosti wrote:
    > Andrew C. West wrote:
    > > If anyone thinks that a mapping table would be
    > > useful as a weapon in the fight against the Chinese proposal,
    > > I would be happy to provide one.
    >
    > Do you have the relevant data? As I said, so far I found little or nothing
    > about "BrdaRten" or about the "Founders System" mentioned by Ken Whistler.

    Previously, Ken Whistler said:
      One additional detail for people. The BrdaRten stacks are currently
      implemented, in the Founders System software in Tibet, as an extension
      to GB 2312.

    This sounds like they might have been implemented as a vendor extension in
    the private/end-user area of GB 2312, if it is anything like how
    as-yet-unencoded Han characters are treated. If so, then one'd probably
    need access to a font itself to see. Looking at Founder's site, I found
    this, a bunch of Tibetan fonts they make:
      http://font.founder.com.cn/chanpinzl/CP_zangwen.htm

    In the body text, they describe Tibetan as 600+ (pre-composed) characters,
    and 4,400+ if Sanskrit is included. But next to each font, it says 4000+
    for the first one (Tibetan and Sanskrit), 2000+ for the second one
    (Tibetan and Sanskrit), and for the last three, 800+ (Tibetan). WG2 N2558
    only proposes 956 pre-composed, so I'm not sure what these
    different numbers mean, except that counts sometimes cavalierly include
    irrelevant stuff like punctuation and symbols to pad the number.

    But so far I haven't seen anything strongly linking Founder to WG2 N2558,
    except that the latter mentions Founder as an *example* of a precomposed
    Tibetan implementation (2). We don't necessarily want to be making
    vendor/legacy/font-based to unicode mapping tables for every potential
    vendor, do we?

    Thomas Chan
    tc31@cornell.edu



    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Dec 18 2002 - 09:58:53 EST