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Re: i18n; wide characters; Guile



Several comments about chinese...
{I don't speak chinese, but I work with those who do
and have delt with a few issues, I am no expert}

--------------------------------------------------
With all this talk of Chinese.. there is another point
that you all may not know about... I know of this
because our company is developing chinese products.

1) The Chinese goverment *requires* that your company licenses and 
   pays a fee to the chinese goverment for the fonts used in your 
   product, well at least our products {hand held electronic stuff}
   The goverment has a "patent" on the dot matrix font and specifies
   by law you that you must use this 

   This "GB" vrs BIG-5 has the chinese goverment behind it and
   the goverement thinks of Taiwan as a renagade province that
   will one day come back to china.

2) In main land china, the code is GB, the goverement stuff is GB
   and is not BIG-5

3) in taiwan, it is Big 5.

It's my personal opinion, the taiwanise system is probably going to 
suffer and get religated to obscurity at some point it may take 
quite a while... but... right now, you must support both.

Why? Concider developing software for two encodings, ASCII & EBCDIC.
The bulk of the world used ASCII, only IBM (and few others) used ASCII.
Eventually ASCII won.

Look at Taiwan vrs Main land... and ask your self the same question
Big 5 or GB... Neither one will go away...

--------------------------------------------------

Somebody... said something about chinese chars... each being
a single word.. that is not exactly true.

Each glyph is not a single word - in many cases it is. However
when two glyphs are put together they become a different word.

The worse part about chinese, is you can only tell by context where
each 'word' starts and ends. It's kinda like the problem of german
compound words. {for non german speakers, germans like to make
huge words by seemingly forgetting to put in spaces between the words}

-Duane.