At 11:14 AM -0500 4/27/2000, Beeler, George W., Ph.D. wrote:
> >Suppose I run a health clinic in Japan, and a Korean comes to me for health
> >care and provides an identification number. My system, which uses Japanese
> >fonts, sends this number to a master patient index for verification. The
> >master index returns to my system a message with the indexed name in
> >Unicode. I display or print the patient's name for verification, but the
> >verification fails because I used the right codes, but the wrong fonts. As
> >a result, the patient says that the display is not his name. This failure
> >to match can be very serious, as I must now suspect that the identification
> >number was incorrect, and therefore may not find (or trust) prior clinical
> >data about this person.
This will NEVER happen at any health clinic in Japan. If you know
a bit about situation of Korean descents in Japan as well as the extent
of difference between Japanese glyphs and 'Korean' glyphs(about which
Japanese seem to care very much while Koreans don't) you would never
had come up with such an unrealistic scenario like this. Moreover,
this can be dealt with much better with Unicode than with any of Japanese
national standards (well, ISO-2022-JP-2 can sort of handle this,...)
so if Japanese are indeed serious about this(even though that is not the
case in reality), they should not complain about Unicode but rather move
onto Unicode ASAP.
Jungshik Shin
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:21:02 EDT