3 ms·

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 proba

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.

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.