On Wed, 20 Mar 2002, John Cowan wrote:
> Dan Kogai scripsit:
> > And as for Chinese, how do you tell whether Traditional or Simplified
> > is more appropriate?
>
> Traditional and Simplified characters are *not* unified in Unicode,
> (BTW, this should go on the list of Unicode Myths),
> so that would be up to the author, not the browser.
That's true, but you still can't distinguish preferred glyph variants of
mainland China from those of Taiwan (nor those from that of Japan,
either). cf., the often-cited U+76F4 and U+9AA8. What is often claimed
as a difference between "Japanese" and "Chinese" is misportrayed and/or
misunderstood as a difference between Japanese language and Chinese
language practices, but is really a difference in national glyph
preferences, e.g., U+9AA8 is often said to be a case where "Japanese" and
"Chinese" differ, but this is true only when comparing the glyph
preference of Japan (not Japanese language) and mainland China, and false
if compared to Taiwan. I think this might be what Dan was referring to.
BTW, there are some people who would've preferred to have traditional and
simplified Chinese characters unified, so that conversion may be performed
by "changing the font". e.g., Founder (sorry, don't have the url at the
moment) has some fonts which come in "J" and "F" versions. The "J"
versions are perfectly normal in being Unicode fonts with simplified
Chinese characters. The "F" versions, however, are a different
story--although they are also Unicode fonts, at the codepoint for a
simplified Chinese one actually finds the glyph for its traditional
analogue (in most cases). Thus, one can store master data in simplified
Chinese, and generate what appears to be traditional Chinese by changing
the font (and making a few minor edits because of lack of 1-to-1
correspondence). e.g., type U+56FD with the "J" font, change
the font to the "F" version and you see the glyph for U+570B, but its
still really U+56FD. Certainly, this sort of thing can't help improve
understanding that simplified and traditional Chinese characters are not
unified in Unicode.
Thomas Chan
tc31@cornell.edu
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