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List:       xfree-fonts
Subject:    [Fonts]Re: Han unification(SC and TC)(was..Re: Automatic 'lang' determination )
From:       "John H. Jenkins" <jenkins () apple ! com>
Date:       2002-06-30 1:15:37
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On Saturday, June 29, 2002, at 12:31 PM, Jungshik Shin wrote:

>   I'm afraid what you have heard of BMP section is misleading if
> I understood you correctly. Whether in BMP or not, simplified forms of
> Chinese characters are NOT UNIFIED with traditional forms of Chinese
> characters. (let me copy my message to John H. Jenkins @Apple who knows a
> lot more about Han Unification than I do.)

This is correct.  The interconversion between SC and TC is in general 
m-to-n, and so unification would not have been possible.  Where a 
character is simply "written differently" in the PRC from Taiwan and 
elsewhere, they are unified (e.g., U+988A), and where an already extant 
character is used as a simplification for another, the older character and 
the simplified character are unified (e.g., U+53F0, which is both a TC 
character in its own right and the simplification for other characters, 
such as U+98B1).  This is done, however, only because the SC form is seen 
as separate from its TC counterpart(s).

> AFAIK, most complaints about
> Han unification does NOT come from zh-CN vs zh-TW BUT from zh-CN/zh-TW
> vs ja. For Han characters common in both zh-CN and zh-TW, there's no
> significant difference in appearence between zh-CN and zh-TW.

Actually, there are some exceptions to this.  U+988A and characters 
containing it make up the bulk of this.  In general, however, you're quite 
correct.

> Although
> many Japanese would not agree with me, I don't think there's any
> significant difference across CJKV.

Also correct.  It's on the order of "color" vs. "colour".  In the bulk of 
the cases which have been unified, all the unified forms will be 
recognized by native readers of all the languages involved, even if they 
may look a little "funny."

> (again, ISO 10646 Han chart is a
> good reference along with ROC MOE's Han character variant dictionary at
> http://140.111.1.40) To me, Han Unification should have gone further (not
> less) in a sense and it's worrisome to me that non-BMP includes too many
> glyph variants (a whole bunch of them coming from Korean Buddist text :
> see http://www.sutra.re.kr)  that should have been unified in my eyes.
>

*sigh*  This is also true.  We should have pushed harder on the IRG during 
the Extension B work to keep this very thing from happening.

==========
John H. Jenkins
jenkins@apple.com
jenkins@mac.com
http://homepage.mac.com/jenkins/

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