Re-assignment of Hangul characters

From: Len Greenwood (leng@vmark.co.uk)
Date: Wed Sep 27 1995 - 04:48:49 EDT


I have some issues regarding the proposed move of Hangul characters
from their current allocations in Unicode 1.1/ISO 10646. Maybe
someone can give me some more information...

On the Unicode ftp site there is a document called hangul-codes.txt
which purports to give the mapping between Johab and Wansung codes
for Hangul characters for Unicode 2.0. From this I can deduce that
characters in Unicode 1.1 in the range U+3400-U+3D2D are moving
at version 2.0, and, from the maps provided for KSC5601-1987, which
is the Wansung encoding, where they are moving to. I can guess that
the characters in the 1.1 "Hangul Supplementary A/B" blocks, U+3D2E-U+4DFF
will also move for 2.0, but I've no idea how they are distributed
through the new range.

We are about to ship alpha software to Korea this week. At this point
only Wansung codes are involved. I can change our mappings from
Unicode 1.1 to Unicode 2.0 positions easily enough, but I am concerned
whether this is their final resting place. Since the customer will be
storing Korean data in Unicode, I don't want to face any more data
conversion scenarios than necessary. So, a couple of questions:

1. Can anyone confirm that the allocation of U+AC00 onwards for Unicode 2.0
   is set in concrete (or, how firm is the concrete right now)? And will
   ISO 10646 ratify the same positions? This is important to us for
   deciding whether to stick with the Unicode 1.1 that we know, or
   take a flier on going to Unicode 2.0 positions in the hope that it
   will remove a conversion later on.

2. Any chance of extending hangul-codes.txt (or provide another file)
   that maps ALL the 1.1 Hangul to their 2.0 places - or, better,
   just add the names for all 11,172 characters (e.g. first is
   HANGUL SYLLABLE KIYEOK A, etc.) Or, since I'm sure the series is
   regularly formed, give the normative names for all 19 leading
   consonants, 21 vowels & 28 trailing consonants _and_the_order_being_
   used_to_generate_the_characters, and one can figure it out.

3. Does anyone have a target date when this character move will be
   confirmed for good?

==============================================================================
   Len Greenwood Internet: greenwood@vmark.co.uk
   VMark Software Ltd. Tel: +44 1908 234990 ext 206
      Power House Fax: +44 1908 234992
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