Re: [tlug] "strange antipathy towards Unicode" . . . . . . . . (was: Re: Learn a Variety of Languages)

["Guillaume Proux" <gproux@example.com>]

People criticizing the Han unification might have a point (do they?)
but for most applications this is  a non-issue.

The chinese character for e.g. "man" will *MEAN* the same in Japanese
and (various) Chinese scripts...  However yes, they have a different
writing... which means a different font.
Guess what most document system out there have found out that you just
need to specify which language (with tags for example)  is used for a
document piece to show the correct writing style.

Just for the little story, I used to be part of Symbian (mobile phone
OS) i18n expert team and the most "zero-fighter" guy in our office
clearly said to me that people refusing Unicode really had no real
argument.

cheers,

Guillaume

On 1/16/07, Jim <jep200404@example.com> wrote:
> Curt Sampson wrote:
>
> > ... Japanese software tends to be worse at language processing
> > than other systems [because] the Japanese tend to have this
> > strange antipathy towards Unicode.
>
> Here's toward understanding the issue:
>
>    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification
>
> which I understand as meaning that there shouldn't be any problem
> with Japanese _only_ text, even mixing kanji, hiragana, and katakana.
> My understanding is that the problem occurs when one mixes Chinese
> characters from different CJK languages in olain text Unicode.
>
> Most folks don't read things with mixed CJK language Chinese
> characters, so Unicode should not be a problem for most folks.
>
> The problem is for folks who need to mix Chinese characters
> from multiple CJK languages in a single plain text Unicode document.
> I guess there would also be a problem supporting multiple CJK
> languages on a single system, even when each plain text Unicode document
> is in a single CJK language, because one would have to choose which
> language to view each document in.
>
> The antipathy might not be by just the Japanese,
> and it might not be so strange.
>
>
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