AW: ¥ instead of \

On 2013/10/27 4:48, Martin J. Dürst wrote:
> 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.

As far as I can see,
- the standard Japanese keyboard layout creates \ U+005C if in Latin mode,
  even if the keycap might have a ¥ Yen symbol.
- the IME, however, will offer to choose either \ or ¥ interactively, if in appropriate mode.
- the font MS Mincho has a ¥ Yen glyph at the U+005C position,
  even in font version 5.01 shipped with Windows 7.

The feeling of an automatic substitution done by Word might come from
the default MS Word settings
- "detect language automatically" and
- "use MS Mincho as default font" for Japanese text.
So it's not a substitution of the codepoints but of the glyphs only (which is of course bad enough).
If the character is formatted with "Arial", a backslash should appear again.

Best Regards, Albrecht.
Received on Mon Oct 28 2013 - 06:39:28 CDT