23 Aug
2001
23 Aug
'01
12:01 a.m.
Kaixo!
Disclaimer: I don't speak chinese nor I live in a country using it;
so my comments should be taken with care.
But am right in believing that it is Microsoft the driving force behind
the making of de-facto standard for any new character included in Big5 ?
As Big5 is in
fact a Windows encoding (cp950) I think it is wise to
follow whatever is the current state in Windows platform, same as
for iso standards the authoritative source is the ISO, for Microsoft
charsets the authoritative source should be Microsoft.
Many thanks for the quick response!
Just to clarify - by Big5 here I mean to refer to the de-facto
standard for which I guess there is no authorative source other
than some kind of periodic re-appraisal of which sets of
characters minimally are expected to be part of any Big5 Also, do you consider the graphical (box/line)
characters
in the range 0xF9DD-0xF9DE inclusive also to be part
of the common Big5 repertoire.
This is a different thing. Those are only useful in console/xterm, and
even if missing they don't harm reading as they are non letters, and aren't
any punctuation amrks nor nothing like that either.
The same holds for koi8-r and koi8-u cyrillic encodings; they complete
character repertoire includes those drawing chars; however a lot of
koi8-{r,u} fonts or support of koi8 encodings just ignore them.
It is just proof that those encodings (as well as big5) originated in DOS
world.
Anyway, in POSIX world hardcoding drawing chars in a given character set is
not portable, it should be done trough upper layer text toolkits like
ncurses, newt, etc. or at worst trough vt100 sequences or things like that.
Just to underscore - by
common here I mean to suggest common across all major
platforms as opposed to common within the most prevalent
client platform (ie. win32)
I think it isn't very important for those drawing chars, as they have no
meaning, even if you display a text without them it won't change the
text meaning.
That being said, they are listed in the file
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/encodings/large/big5.eten-0.enc.gz
(which gives the encoding for *-big5.eten-0 and *-big5-0 fonts built on
the fly out of unicode encoded TTF fonts). So, yes, they should be
common, but some fonts may lack them if the one that draw the font felt
it wasn't worth the time to draw those drawing chars
(well, for a font with several thousands glyphs it is a rather strange
thing to say; but for the koi8 ones for example it is quite common the
dawing chars have not been done).
In short: I think yes, they should be included in the big majority of
'big5' fonts out there; but even if not, it is much less a problem than
the lack of a hanzi.
--
Ki ça vos våye bén,
Pablo Saratxaga
http://www.srtxg.easynet.be/ PGP Key available, key ID: 0x8F0E4975
------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~-->
Get VeriSign's FREE GUIDE: "Securing Your Web Site for Business." Learn
about using SSL for serious online security. Click Here!
http://us.click.yahoo.com/KYe3qC/I56CAA/yigFAA/23wwlB/TM
---------------------------------------------------------------------~->
To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
i18n-chinese-unsubscribe(a)egroups.com
URL to this group:
http://www.egroups.com/group/i18n-chinese
Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/