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They might be alluding to issues from CJK unification. But I don’t believe that many practitioners working with Japanese text consider these concerns more impor

by rtpg 4y ago

They might be alluding to issues from CJK unification. But I don’t believe that many practitioners working with Japanese text consider these concerns more important than the value that Unicode brings to the table. I think that CJK unification leads to awkwardness where some fonts will basically render some kanji the “Chinese way” or the “Japanese way”, so you can’t really have a good font that covers both at once. There’s a good aesthetic argument about not using the same font for both languages, but Unicode outright precludes it I think

lmm 4y ago
Virtually every Japanese organisation disagrees, you only have to look at a Japanese website to know as much (or are those somehow not "practitioners working with Japanese text"?). Most will use a non-Unicode encoding and/or resort to rendering important text as images, since it's impossible to rely on Unicode text rendering well.
- josephg 4y ago
  I wonder if this can ever be fixed. If basically every Japanese organization disagrees with the Unicode consortium to the point that its undermining the use of unicode in entire countries, it might be worth unwinding CJK normalization.
  - Freak_NL 4y ago
    This isn't the case obviously. Japanese organisations are involved in the Unicode process (something evidenced in the input for the several CJK Unified Ideograph Extensions). Thank to Unicode, many historical characters can be represented in digital text without resorting to placeholders or hacks. Anecdotally, I've visited a group enthusiastically exploring the possibilities of the then-new CJK Unified Ideograph Extension B in Tokyo over a decade ago. The CJK issue mentioned here was a bigger problem then than now (most developers know how to handle it properly, e.g. with language declarations in HTML etc.). People will use legacy encodings. That's just a fact of life. Sometimes out of inertia (i.e., it just works, so why bother changing it?), sometimes out of technical limitations of their pipeline, sometimes because of a lack of understanding, rarely out of principle. I'm stuck fixing an issue with some numb skull sending us SAML requests declared as UTF-8 containing some obsolete encoding instead, and this is for Dutch text! This just happens. There is also nothing wrong with text in Shift-JIS, if that encoding encompasses all characters used.
- squaresmile 4y ago
  From here [0], 94.1% of .jp websites use UTF-8 and 6.5% use Shift-JIS. You can find a list of popular sites still using Shift-JIS here [1]. If you change your PC or your phone locale to Japanese and access mostly Japanese website, the font display on most major OS works well. It's probably fair to assume that's a very common setup for Japanese users, and probably for Chinese and Korean users as well. I think the CJK "problem" is more apparent for international users who don't have the locale setup or dealing with multiple languages plain text at the same time. [0] https://w3techs.com/technologies/segmentation/tld-jp-/character_encoding https://w3techs.com/technologies/segmentation/tld-jp-/charac... [1] https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/en-shiftjis https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/en-shiftjis
  - lmm 4y ago
    Your own link shows that both Shift-JIS and EUC-JP are on an upward trend, which isn't what we'd expect if Unicode was succeeding. I can't see it listing examples of .jp sites using UTF-8; would be interesting to see how many of them are relying on text-as-images.
  - fomine3 4y ago
    Yeah what lmm says is not what happend/thought in Japan. Japanese still uses Shift_JIS because they love (/s) legacy software. Using Shift_JIS isn't a practical solution.
- rtpg 4y ago
  Random sample of some websites: - Rakuten Bank -> Shift JIS - NHK, the Ministry of Health and Labor Welfare, yahoo japan -> UTF-8 I don't really really know, but this random yahoo answers [0] page seems to agree with me that really you're gonna use UTF-8 for new stuff in general One point that answer brings up that I hadn't thought of: older flipphones would have good shift-JIS support but not necessarily good unicode support My guess is that "text as images" might partly be that, partly what you are saying in a legacy sense, and also partly for the same reason old sites in the US would do that: to make something look the way you want and you already have a photoshop render [0]: https://detail.chiebukuro.yahoo.co.jp/qa/question_detail/q1487980789 https://detail.chiebukuro.yahoo.co.jp/qa/question_detail/q14...
- GoblinSlayer 4y ago
  Ironically my company sends letters fully rendered as raster images, ugh.

by rtpg 4y ago

lmm 4y ago

Virtually every Japanese organisation disagrees, you only have to look at a Japanese website to know as much (or are those somehow not "practitioners working with Japanese text"?). Most will use a non-Unicode encoding and/or resort to rendering important text as images, since it's impossible to rely on Unicode text rendering well.

josephg 4y ago
I wonder if this can ever be fixed. If basically every Japanese organization disagrees with the Unicode consortium to the point that its undermining the use of unicode in entire countries, it might be worth unwinding CJK normalization.
- Freak_NL 4y ago
  This isn't the case obviously. Japanese organisations are involved in the Unicode process (something evidenced in the input for the several CJK Unified Ideograph Extensions). Thank to Unicode, many historical characters can be represented in digital text without resorting to placeholders or hacks. Anecdotally, I've visited a group enthusiastically exploring the possibilities of the then-new CJK Unified Ideograph Extension B in Tokyo over a decade ago. The CJK issue mentioned here was a bigger problem then than now (most developers know how to handle it properly, e.g. with language declarations in HTML etc.). People will use legacy encodings. That's just a fact of life. Sometimes out of inertia (i.e., it just works, so why bother changing it?), sometimes out of technical limitations of their pipeline, sometimes because of a lack of understanding, rarely out of principle. I'm stuck fixing an issue with some numb skull sending us SAML requests declared as UTF-8 containing some obsolete encoding instead, and this is for Dutch text! This just happens. There is also nothing wrong with text in Shift-JIS, if that encoding encompasses all characters used.
squaresmile 4y ago
From here [0], 94.1% of .jp websites use UTF-8 and 6.5% use Shift-JIS. You can find a list of popular sites still using Shift-JIS here [1]. If you change your PC or your phone locale to Japanese and access mostly Japanese website, the font display on most major OS works well. It's probably fair to assume that's a very common setup for Japanese users, and probably for Chinese and Korean users as well. I think the CJK "problem" is more apparent for international users who don't have the locale setup or dealing with multiple languages plain text at the same time. [0] https://w3techs.com/technologies/segmentation/tld-jp-/character_encoding https://w3techs.com/technologies/segmentation/tld-jp-/charac... [1] https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/en-shiftjis https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/en-shiftjis
- lmm 4y ago
  Your own link shows that both Shift-JIS and EUC-JP are on an upward trend, which isn't what we'd expect if Unicode was succeeding. I can't see it listing examples of .jp sites using UTF-8; would be interesting to see how many of them are relying on text-as-images.
- fomine3 4y ago
  Yeah what lmm says is not what happend/thought in Japan. Japanese still uses Shift_JIS because they love (/s) legacy software. Using Shift_JIS isn't a practical solution.
rtpg 4y ago
Random sample of some websites: - Rakuten Bank -> Shift JIS - NHK, the Ministry of Health and Labor Welfare, yahoo japan -> UTF-8 I don't really really know, but this random yahoo answers [0] page seems to agree with me that really you're gonna use UTF-8 for new stuff in general One point that answer brings up that I hadn't thought of: older flipphones would have good shift-JIS support but not necessarily good unicode support My guess is that "text as images" might partly be that, partly what you are saying in a legacy sense, and also partly for the same reason old sites in the US would do that: to make something look the way you want and you already have a photoshop render [0]: https://detail.chiebukuro.yahoo.co.jp/qa/question_detail/q1487980789 https://detail.chiebukuro.yahoo.co.jp/qa/question_detail/q14...
GoblinSlayer 4y ago
Ironically my company sends letters fully rendered as raster images, ugh.