4 ms·

So it is the same symbol, recognized as that symbol, meaning the same thing but showing up as what some people consider comic sans? So the problem is the font?

by mey 9y ago

cryptonector 9y ago
The problem is not the font. Users of CJK actually want this distinction in codepoint assignments, not font choice. Non-CJK users might think it silly, and maybe it is, but whatever the case, unification has been abandoned.
- unscaled 9y ago
  Yes, theoretically speaking this distinction might have been useful, but so would have been combining hieroglyphs and hangul jamo and the ability to define an entirely new CJK character by specifying components and placements would have been even nicer. None of this would be solved by devolving back to popular pre-unicode standards like EUC-JP or Big5.
lmm 9y ago
Yes except that there's no way to choose a font that all users will be happy with - if you switch your application to a font that uses the Japanese way of writing the character, some Chinese people with that character in their name will be equally unhappy. (It's hard to create an exact analogy because there's no country that the US has the same kind of tense relationship with, and we don't attach quite the same personal meaning to the exact reading of our name - we're used to seeing our names written in capitals and lower-case and being the same name, we don't tell people the meanings of the characters used in our names as we spell them, but I guess imagine having a 7 in your name that you care about quite personally and then a program you use renders it as a French 7 even though you hate the French - you can tell that it's the same character, but it's still wrong and feels very rude. It's the sort of thing that seems trivial in the abstract but ends up being felt surprisingly personally - I'm always a lot more pissed off than I expected to be when people call me "Imm"). You could do something like switching the font based on the system locale, but at that point you're no better off than when you were using the system's character encoding, and following a less well-trodden path.
- unscaled 9y ago
  Well, there is really no way to solve this other than using a language-specific font or markup to indicate the language of the text. The first solution is probably the more common one, since there are very few international fonts that actually do CJK languages well to begin with. The number of characters you need to cover is hard enough to make it a daunting task, and if Han Unification didn't exist it could have been 3 times harder... The TRON Multilingual System (which was championed by the Han Unification opponents in the 90s) basically does second solution. It did avoid character unification between Chinese, Japanese and Korean, but it still chose to specify the language of the text to support different overall processing based on the language (e.g. different ligatures may be activated for different European languages). If you're talking about Japanese users being unhappy that their name characters change when its rendered _within Chinese Text_ - well, that's how it's always been in newspapers, books and official documents. Signs all over Japan (made by Japanese for Chinese tourists) show the Chinese rendition of Japanese place names such as 涩谷 (Shibuya) and nobody seems to bother. It goes the other way too, of course.
  - lmm 9y ago
    > Well, there is really no way to solve this other than using a language-specific font or markup to indicate the language of the text. The first solution is probably the more common one, since there are very few international fonts that actually do CJK languages well to begin with. Indeed, but - more by accident than design - traditional codepages end up making language-specific fonts easy, since you'll naturally use different fonts for different encodings (and if you don't, it's easy to switch to doing so, because you were already carrying around the encoding for each piece of text so you know which texts are Chinese and which are Japanese). I mean, using UTF-8 you could carry around that metadata manually and achieve the same result, but that's a lot less fail-fast; you usually only realise you needed that information after you've got a substantial amount of text of unknown language stored in your system. Whereas if you fail to store which encoding text is in then you (hopefully) notice sooner. > Signs all over Japan (made by Japanese for Chinese tourists) show the Chinese rendition of Japanese place names such as 涩谷 (Shibuya) and nobody seems to bother. Sure, which I think is what mislead the Unicode consortium - for ordinary text no-one cares, and most people's names aren't affected. But the people whose names are affected can take it quite personally.

So it is the same symbol, recognized as that symbol, meaning the same thing but showing up as what some people consider comic sans? So the problem is the font?

by mey 9y ago

So it is the same symbol, recognized as that symbol, meaning the same thing but showing up as what some people consider comic sans? So the problem is the font?

cryptonector 9y ago

The problem is not the font. Users of CJK actually want this distinction in codepoint assignments, not font choice. Non-CJK users might think it silly, and maybe it is, but whatever the case, unification has been abandoned.

unscaled 9y ago
Yes, theoretically speaking this distinction might have been useful, but so would have been combining hieroglyphs and hangul jamo and the ability to define an entirely new CJK character by specifying components and placements would have been even nicer. None of this would be solved by devolving back to popular pre-unicode standards like EUC-JP or Big5.

lmm 9y ago

Yes except that there's no way to choose a font that all users will be happy with - if you switch your application to a font that uses the Japanese way of writing the character, some Chinese people with that character in their name will be equally unhappy. (It's hard to create an exact analogy because there's no country that the US has the same kind of tense relationship with, and we don't attach quite the same personal meaning to the exact reading of our name - we're used to seeing our names written in capitals and lower-case and being the same name, we don't tell people the meanings of the characters used in our names as we spell them, but I guess imagine having a 7 in your name that you care about quite personally and then a program you use renders it as a French 7 even though you hate the French - you can tell that it's the same character, but it's still wrong and feels very rude. It's the sort of thing that seems trivial in the abstract but ends up being felt surprisingly personally - I'm always a lot more pissed off than I expected to be when people call me "Imm"). You could do something like switching the font based on the system locale, but at that point you're no better off than when you were using the system's character encoding, and following a less well-trodden path.

unscaled 9y ago
Well, there is really no way to solve this other than using a language-specific font or markup to indicate the language of the text. The first solution is probably the more common one, since there are very few international fonts that actually do CJK languages well to begin with. The number of characters you need to cover is hard enough to make it a daunting task, and if Han Unification didn't exist it could have been 3 times harder... The TRON Multilingual System (which was championed by the Han Unification opponents in the 90s) basically does second solution. It did avoid character unification between Chinese, Japanese and Korean, but it still chose to specify the language of the text to support different overall processing based on the language (e.g. different ligatures may be activated for different European languages). If you're talking about Japanese users being unhappy that their name characters change when its rendered _within Chinese Text_ - well, that's how it's always been in newspapers, books and official documents. Signs all over Japan (made by Japanese for Chinese tourists) show the Chinese rendition of Japanese place names such as 涩谷 (Shibuya) and nobody seems to bother. It goes the other way too, of course.
- lmm 9y ago
  > Well, there is really no way to solve this other than using a language-specific font or markup to indicate the language of the text. The first solution is probably the more common one, since there are very few international fonts that actually do CJK languages well to begin with. Indeed, but - more by accident than design - traditional codepages end up making language-specific fonts easy, since you'll naturally use different fonts for different encodings (and if you don't, it's easy to switch to doing so, because you were already carrying around the encoding for each piece of text so you know which texts are Chinese and which are Japanese). I mean, using UTF-8 you could carry around that metadata manually and achieve the same result, but that's a lot less fail-fast; you usually only realise you needed that information after you've got a substantial amount of text of unknown language stored in your system. Whereas if you fail to store which encoding text is in then you (hopefully) notice sooner. > Signs all over Japan (made by Japanese for Chinese tourists) show the Chinese rendition of Japanese place names such as 涩谷 (Shibuya) and nobody seems to bother. Sure, which I think is what mislead the Unicode consortium - for ordinary text no-one cares, and most people's names aren't affected. But the people whose names are affected can take it quite personally.