On Tue, 3 Oct 2000, Ayers, Mike wrote:
> Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't such a designator unnecessary?
> GB encoded material is simplified by definition, likewise Big5 encoded
> material is traditional by definition, and Unicode
> has encodings for both glyphs of a simplified/traditional pair - -
I'm very confused with the issue, but I'm afraid so are many others
who try to understand it without actually knowing any Chinese. :-(
Does Unicode encode traditional and simplified Chinese characters
separately, or is the difference considered as glyph variation only,
to be indicated (if desired) at higher protocol levels?
My mental model is the following:
- there is a very large number of Chinese characters in use
- some of them are encoded in Big5, and some of them are encoded
in GB standards
- Big5 is intended for use with display as traditional glyphs and
GB for simplified, but there is no logical necessity to that
(though in practice recoding would be needed in order to display
data in the other encoding)
- Unicode contains the union of Big5 and GB characters
- you could thus recode Big5 and GB to Unicode, and you could leave
the glyph issue unspecified (so that the recipient user could
select either traditional or simplified glyphs).
But I'm pretty sure I have either missed some essential exceptions
or misunderstood the whole issue. Can anyone clarify, or point to
a resource (preferably a Web page) where these things are explained?
-- Yucca, http://www.hut.fi/u/jkorpela/ or http://yucca.hut.fi/yucca.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:21:14 EDT