On Tue, 17 Aug 1999, Markus Kuhn wrote:
> wide-character behaviour of the various pre-Unicode East Asian legacy
> character sets. Their wide Latin/Greek/Cyrillic characters look just
> plain ugly, and they are not something we should carry over into the
> Unicode terminal emulator world. Therefore, I suggest that xterm,
> kermit, the Linux console, etc. all take any character with the
> EastAsian Ambiguous (A) property from the normal (half-width) font (one
> character = one cell). The implementations are free to offer special
> additional backwards-compatibility modes for EUC-style behaviour, etc.,
> but this should not be the normal standard mode of operations under
> UTF-8.
This is not merely a question of backwards compatiblity. In many cases,
wide alphabetic characters are desirable in a CJK context. There is a
common Japanese habit of writing abbreviations like NATO and short even
words like FAX untranslated in wide capital letters in the text. This
habit exists is prior to the design of the EUC codings.
Removing alphabetic widechars will strengthen the case of those in Japan,
who claim that asian writing systems can't be unified and that Unicode is
a straight-jacket.
On the other hand, wide alphabetic characters cause a lot of confusion
among ordinary users even in East-Asia, who use them inadvertently, e.g.
for naming files. But that is rather a question of input method design.
-phm
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:51 EDT