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Abstract

The Hithhiker's Guide to Chinese Encodings

Thomas Emerson - Basis Technology Corporation

Intended Audience: Software Engineer
Session Level: Intermediate

This presentation presents an overview and analysis of the plethora of Chinese character encodings, describing their similarities and differences, and describing how they map to various versions of Unicode. For example, how does Big Five compare with Big 5+ and Microsoft CP950? What about the various extensions to Big Five? How do the HKSCS and Eten the HKUST EUDC extensions to Big 5 compare and map to Unicode? How does one round-trip each of these? And then there is CNS-11643...

Unfortunately dealing Simplified Chinese is no simpler: what is the relationship between GB 2312:80 and GB 12345:90 (GB 12345 is the traditional analog to GB 2312) and how does GB 12345 compare with Big 5. For that matter, how does GB 2312:80 compare with GBK, Microsoft CP936, and GB18030? And how do all of these map to Unicode 2.1 and 3.1? What does this all mean for the poor programmer who has to try and deal with China.

At the end of this presentation it is expected that you will leave with a better understanding of how these encodings relate and how to deal with them when authoring Chinese-language applications.


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Unicode Standard Conference Board Past Conferences Call for Papers Sponsors Showcase
Registration Accommodation Travel Program Talks and Papers Next Conference
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