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"222 additional CJK Unified Ideographs in common use in China, Taiwan, and Japan" Enough to make the japanese stop not wanting to use unicode to represent thei

• klodolph 16y ago
  As I understand it (and I know almost nothing about Japan), the problem wasn't with the number of characters in the CJK set, the problem was with CJK unification itself. If a Japanese reader goes through the list of CJK characters, what they'll see is a bunch of Chinese characters that happen to usually have almost the same shapes as Japanese characters. Apparently, some characters (relatively obscure ones used for names) are still missing. At the time, the majority opinion at Unicode was "that's just a font problem" but you see, it was people from Europe who were pushing for CJK unification in the first place. However, there are some characters in CJK whose standard glyphs are so different from the Japanese kanji that they are unrecognizable to native readers. Language experts would look at both glyphs and say they are the same character, but most people are not experts. The lesson learned (since this is HN): If you are writing an internationalized application, make sure you use the right font for Japanese users and the right font for Chinese users. And this is one more reason why internationalization is hard, and just using UTF-8/16/32 strings is not good enough.