Rick McGowan wrote:
>
> I'm looking for a problem to which all of these engineering solutions are
> being proposed and discussed. I don't yet see anything that needs to be
> solved. I see a theoretically chaotic situation, not an actually chaotic
> situation.
Here is a quote from the November 27, 2000 Seybold Report on Publishing
Systems, from the article 'The Second Wave of Japanese Desktop Publishing':
Gaiji are Kanji characters outside the current JIS and Unicode
encoding sets and are not included in a standard font. They comprise
many "unofficial" Kanji characters, mistakes and misinterpretations,
and seldom-used Kanji passed down for generations, long before
printing presses and governments created standards. These Gaiji
characters are widely used in people- and place-names. To this day,
they are a reason for publishers to hang on to their proprietary
systems.
I personally don't know enough about Japanese to say if this is indeed a
character collection problem, or only a glyph variant problem; I suspect it is
a combination of both.
Like many on this list, I am entirely of the opinion that every character is
either currently in Unicode or on the way for a feature version. However good
the process may be to add characters, it still remains that there is a lag and
something has to be done in the meantime; until three weeks ago, there were
about 40,000 characters I may have a need for, and my only Unicode-compatible
solution was to use the PUA. Until Unicode 3.2 is out, there are characters in
JIS X 0213:2000 which are not in Unicode. And all the descriptions of Gaiji I
have heard suggest that there are characters that will not make it for a long
time.
In other words, for a Japanese publisher, it seems that the PUA is something
you have to use every day, in almost every document. Would that qualify for
your search?
Eric.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Jul 06 2001 - 00:17:16 EDT