Re: ¥ instead of \

On 2013/10/23 4:22, Asmus Freytag wrote:
> On 10/22/2013 11:38 AM, Jean-François Colson wrote:
>> Hello.
>>
>> I know that in some Japanese encodings (JIS, EUC), \ was replaced by a ¥.
>>
>> On my computer, there are some Japanese fonts where the characters
>> seems coded following Unicode, except for the \ which remained a ¥.

Yes. I'm using a Japanese Windows 7, and I can't distinguish the two
glyphs in your message (and won't use any of them).

>> Is that acceptable from a Unicode point of view?
>>
>> Are such fonts Unicode considered compliant?
>
> It's one of those things where there isn't a clean solution that's also
> backwards compatible.

One idea that I have been floating already years ago is that Microsoft
with each new release of Windows (and other vendors too, of course)
tweak the Yen glyph in the respective fonts to loose more and more of
their horizontal bars and the upper right part of the Y, and slant the
lower part of the Y more and more.

That would put pressure on applications (mostly financial) that still
use U+005D with Yen semantics, and help Japanese programmers to move
from seeing a Yen symbol where they should see a backslash. There are
enough replacements for the Yen symbol. The usual (i.e. 'half-width') is
at U+00A6, which came into Unicode from ISO-8859-1 (interesting to note
that the Yen appears in a rather constrained Western-European encoding).
There's also a full-width variant.

One thing that I have never checked personally, but which I heard from a
former colleague who knew a lot of character encoding trivia and
oddities, is that (at least at some point a few years ago) Japanese MS
Word would change U+00A6 to U+005D without asking the user. Possibly the
idea was that this way, the data could be more easily converted back
from Unicode to Shift_JIS. But in terms of moving away from using U+005D
with a Yen glyyh, it was definitely counterproductive.

Regards, Martin.
Received on Sun Oct 27 2013 - 20:29:54 CDT