Re: traditional vs simplified chinese

From: John H. Jenkins (jenkins@apple.com)
Date: Thu Feb 13 2003 - 10:27:15 EST

  • Next message: Marco Cimarosti: "RE: Indic Vowel/Consonant combinations"

    On Thursday, February 13, 2003, at 07:18 AM, Marco Cimarosti wrote:

    >
    > 3) All other characters listed in Unihan.txt are *both*
    > "Traditional" and "Simplified".
    >

    Actually, this is not quite true. Even though the current set of
    traditional/simplified data is much better than it's ever been, we
    still have cases where new simplified forms have been created and
    encoded where their traditional counterparts have not, and considerably
    more cases where traditional forms have theoretical simplifications
    which have not been encoded.

    The best you can say is that if a character has a traditional variant
    (but no simplified variant), it's simplified, and if it has a
    simplified variant (and no traditional variant), it's traditional, and
    if it has both, it's both.

    >
    > Anyway, I don't see how this information could be of any use for any
    > purpose...
    >

    There are some ideographs (e.g., anything with the bone radical) which
    have different appearance in simplified and traditional Chinese, even
    though the two have been unified in Unicode. Identifying a text as
    simplified vs. traditional could help in automatic font selection.

    ==========
    John H. Jenkins
    jenkins@apple.com
    jhjenkins@mac.com
    http://www.tejat.net/



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