Re: tlug: A couple of questions about Unicode

[Taro Yamamoto <tyamamot@example.com>]

I am a new member of this list, as my profession is typography, if I may
express my opinion about this Unicode issue ...

Craig Oda wrote:
> with two TLUG members and the editor of O'Reilly Japan, I seem to
> recall that the han-unification issue was a big point and that there is
> a Japanese book out about how bad unicode is for the Japanese.
> Evidently, it was a best seller in Japan.  The other two TLUG members
> and myself were pro-unicode and the O'Reilly editor was neutral.  We were
> just talking about what the Japanese public felt about it.

As someone in this mailing list already mentioned, any character set and
encoding standards deal only with encoded "Characters", each of which is
a minimum unit of textual information on computers and electronic
communication lines. Unicode is nothing that is beyond this scope that
is conceptually sharable to any other character set and encoding
standards (except proprietary glyph-based character sets).

It means that each character defined in such standards is not a
"representation (instance)" but a "prototype" of the character as
functional and semantic information unit. As you may know, in the real
world typography and publishing, one character can have multiple
different variations such as the "TAKA" glyph used by Takashimaya
Department Store. The TAKA "Character" itself is a very frequently used
JOYO character that is included in the standard JIS character set, but
very few systems are making the Takashimaya's variant form accessible
and usable to the user (and in some systems supporting the glyph as
another coded character as gaiji, the a-kind-of relationship between the
prototypical TAKA character and THE variant glyph is inevitably lost).
In this case, it can be said that the TAKA character unifies various
possible variations such as the Takashimaya's glyph. In this way,
han-unification is nothing special (to Unicode), but an essential
categorization operation that can be seen in any character set standards
(the current JIS X 0208:1997 was edited, paying attention to this
unification issue).

So, in order to make the Takashimaya's TAKA glyph accessible elegantly,
some glyph switching and substituting mechanism is essential. The same
thing can apply to the Chinese/Japanese/Korean characters unified in the
Unicode, where locale information will be an important key.

All such talks about "representation" model of characters, glyphs and
fonts is beyond the scope of Unicode and character set standars (this is
a very important point when one comments on a character set standard
such as Unicode). But I remember one of Glen Adams' (a Unicode advocate)
tutorial document on Unicode distributed at a Unicode conference
mentioned the importance of glyph switching mechinism in Unicode.

I feel most people criticizing the han-unification of Unicode do not
really understand the issue, and tend to confuse various different
levels of things and make a straw figure they can easily attack. By
saying so, I do not mean that Unicode and existing standard character
sets are free from problems, but just that different things should be
discussed separately.

Regarding the issue of classical forms of kanji characters, there can be
two separate issues. One is about variant glyph styles of standard
characters already included in a standard character set. It is possible
to cover those glyphs by using the same glyph switching mechanism as
mentioend above (if it allows one to n glyphs mappings). The other issue
is about characters that are not included in any existing character
sets. Standards have to be extended in this case, but as for Unicode, it
is based on source character sets (such as JIS X 0208 and 0212), the
extension of the character set is not really an issue about Unicode but,
first, of the source standards, I feel.

Regards,

--Taro Yamamoto
(tyamamot@example.com)















So, some glyph-selection and substitution mechanism is needed to
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