Re: i18n; wide characters; Guile

[Shiro Kawai <shiro@sqush.squareusa.com>]

These are complex issues widely discussed for years and maybe
there's no universal solution...

> From:    Jim Blandy <jimb@red-bean.com>
>
> Could you tell me more about the circumstances in which people want to
> use old-style characters?

Mostly names of person or place.  And in literature some writers prefer
old ones.  Since each Chinese character has its own meanings, and even
the parts included in Chinese character have meanings, it's not so simple
to replace shapes.

> From:    kwright@tiac.net (Keith Wright)
> 
> I think this means that you can use a fixed width 16 bit
> representation for most daily correspondence, but you will still need
> escape codes and special purpose fonts for ancient Chinese, for the
> artist formerly known as Prince, and for logos and other graphics that
> are embeded in text.

Right.  Actually, I read japanese online newspapers, and occasionally
I see "blank" characters which is for the characters not included
in standard JIS encodings.  It's always names of person or place.

> From:    Ulrich Drepper <drepper@ipd.info.uni-karlsruhe.de>
> 
> You should probably take a look at the rules of the Unicode committee
> to make the Han unification (sorry, I should better say CJK
> unification :-).  Many Japanese didn't excepted this unification and
> one prominent professor (I forgot his name, he was a big name on the
> Tron project) used his position to fight against Unicode.

Is he Mr. Ken Sakamura?
Anyway, I need to survey more to contribute to this discussion.

--
Shiro KAWAI
  Square USA Inc.   Honolulu Studio, R&D division
#"The most important things are the hardest things to say" --- Stephen King