What is the difference between Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese? Are they different languages? Is it just an issue of font variation? A lot of confusion exists about the Chinese writing system, especially for software engineers and translators faced with working on a Chinese system.

This presentation begins with a history of the Chinese writing system, noting its evolution over the last three thousand years and how this has impacted the design of modern Chinese character sets, character encodings, and fonts. The history of Character simplification will also be discussed, since it isn't a recent phenomenon and can lead to some surprises: not all "simplified" characters have fewer strokes than their "traditional" counterparts, for example.

The talk will describe character usage in different parts of Great China and how this has effected the design of various Chinese character set standards, including Unicode, where I will talk about Han unification and the controversies its raised.