Re: [tlug] japanese encoding question

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

>>>>> "Brett" == Brett Robson <b-robson@example.com> writes:

    Brett> Hi, I thought I had this Japanese encoding stuff sorted out
    Brett> but my industrious Japanese colleagues seem to find new
    Brett> things to confuse me.

You never will get it sorted out, because the Japanese themselves
won't.  They've been arguing these issues since JIS C 6226 (1976), or
before that if you want to count the Toyo and Joyo kanji.

    Brett> I've got a problem with a character on one of our pages
    Brett> that is breaking some browsers. It is a roman numeral 2, ie
    Brett> it looks like II but one character.

Vendor-specific enhancement.  Most of the corporate Kanji collections
have it---eg, I think both Fuji FM/Towns and old NECs had it before
they went to vanilla Shift JIS---but it didn't make it into JIS X 0208
or JIS X 0212.

Roman numerals are, however, in Unicode (in the Number Forms block,
specifically U+2160 to U+217F).

    Brett> Does anyone know what's going on here?

Ken Lunde.  _Understanding CJKV Information Processing_, O'Reilly.
You could also try the UTF-2000/CHISE project, the URL is somewhat
dated but still works, I think:  http://www.m17n.org/utf-2000/.

    Brett> Before anyone does say it, I would love them to use EUC and
    Brett> not SJIS.

Stay away from EUC, too, if at all possible.  You really don't want to
be using anything but Unicode if you can avoid it.  There is no real
advantage to using JIS standards, as for practical purposes their only
meaning now is due to the fact that they are grandfathered into
Unicode (although Unicode code point assignment may take some time).

It's true that Unihan is annoying in multilingual CJK pages, but there
are ways to deal with it, and they're going to be valid essentially
forever.

-- 
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences     http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
University of Tsukuba                    Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
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