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> Unicode is uniquely worse for Japanese than for any other real-life world language I'm not seeing any reason this is worse in Japanese than Chinese. Only in
by hnfong 2y ago
> Unicode is uniquely worse for Japanese than for any other real-life world language
I'm not seeing any reason this is worse in Japanese than Chinese.
Only in recent years has Chinese overtaken Japanese as the predominant CJK population (for tech products). For a long time the Japanese market was larger than the Chinese market. You can just check the historical GDP as a ballpark figure.
In the 1990s and early 2000s, we (context: Hong Kong) kind of thought knowing Japanese was so cool because it allowed us to type Kanji which we repurposed as Chinese characters in some systems. (I think it was mostly Japanese games or games localized for Japan, and maybe some obscure systems.)
Even today this isn't just a fonts issue. Simplified Chinese uses different codepoints for many of the characters, so international software makers need to localize totally differently anyway. There's no reason they can't use a Japanese font when the language is Japanese.
Why didn't Japanese software adopt Unicode in the early 2000s? Why did Chinese software adopt Unicode?
- lmm 2y ago> I'm not seeing any reason this is worse in Japanese than Chinese. A priori yes, the fact there's a collision between Japanese and Chinese only tells you one of them is going to win and get the normal experience and the other is going to lose and have Unicode uniquely suck for them - history could conceivably have flipped which was which. Another reply suggests that China had laws requiring products sold there to display Chinese correctly whereas Japan did not, which could be the kind of thing that tips the default/standard.