Hiro,
I already provided some preliminary feedback to Toyoshima-sensei about
this new JIS standard. While they are extending Shift-JIS encoding in
truly interesting ways, I made a strong suggestion that every
character be given both a Shift-JIS and Unicode code point. This is so
that the standard has a chance of being accepted by industry.
Operating system developers who originally worked with Shift-JIS
encoding are moving toward Unicode (for obvious reasons). It is easier
to consider moving completely to Unicode if this standard requires
re-working the definition of Shift-JIS (without a Unicode
representation).
I am still trying to determine whether JIS X 0221-1995 Ideographic
Supplement 1 (918 kanji from JIS X 0212-1990) is included in this new
standard, in entirety. It is not possible to extract the text from the
PDFs due to security being applied. I have asked for machine-readable
tables that indicate Unicode and JIS X 0212-1990 mappings. The
mappings exist, but not in a machine-readable form available on the
web site.
It should be up to the developers of this new JIS standard to
determine mappings to Unicode characters beyond what is defined for
Version 2.1. If they have not yet requested data for the additional
block of Unicode ideographs, perhaps the keeper of the data (glyphs
along with machine-readable data) should pro-actively provide it to
them.
It is interesting that JSA is abandoning JIS X 0212-1990. They seem to
refer to it as a phantom standard. It is an "alive and well" phantom
by virtue of the fact that all of it is included in JIS X 0212-1990,
and that Microsoft has included all of its characters in their latest
Japanese fonts for Windows. This is why many JIS X 0212-1990 kanji
(and non-kanji) are in this new JIS standard.
Regards...
-- Ken Lunde
Manager, CJKV Type Development
Adobe Systems Incorporated
lunde@adobe.com
http://www.oreilly.com/~lunde/ (WWW Home Page)
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/cjkvinfo/ (new book to be released in 12/98)
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