15 ms·

The difference between traditional and simplified Chinese characters is more than simply different fonts. Part of the difficulty is that some simplified charact

by austinz 12y ago

The difference between traditional and simplified Chinese characters is more than simply different fonts. Part of the difficulty is that some simplified characters map to multiple traditional characters, which means that converting from one to the other may be lossy. There's also the Japanese equivalent of simplified characters (shinjitai), many of which differ from their Chinese counterparts, as well as characters that were invented in Japan and may or may not have Chinese equivalents (kokuji).

Tomte 12y ago
Some. I know that not every letter has been Han-unified, but I don't know the specifics. Is it possible, that this problem of yours has actually been taken care of? If not, is it possible that it's just a mistake instead of a big evil conspiracy?
- com2kid 12y ago
  AFAIK it was a historical attempt to save on encoding space back when Unicode had a 16bit fixed width and could only support up to 65K characters. Now that Unicode has expanded out, I am confused why anyone still defends this practice.
  - Tomte 12y ago
    That's just one of the reasons people had (and you can't really expect everyone involved to have totally congruent reasons). But how about "g"? Do you really believe the two common variants (one storey/two stories) should have separate code points? What about German vs. French vs. Danish vs. etc.? All different "g"? Why? And if not, what is the core difference?
    - 1ris 12y ago
      The Cyrillic R (looks like P) and and Greek Roh (also looks like P) and the Latin P are not unified either. Although I think unifying some Greek and Cyrillic letters would have made sense.
vilhelm_s 12y ago
Simplified and traditional characters have different unicode codepoints. Japanese and mainland simplifications have different codepoints when they differ, and Japanese-only characters of course have their own codepoints. The argument is about characters like 冷. It is given a single codepoint, but Chinese typefaces draw the bottommost stroke diagonally, and Japanese typefaces tend to draw it vertically. (When writing it by hand, both versions are acceptable in Japanese also, http://detail.chiebukuro.yahoo.co.jp/qa/question_detail/q1055414995 http://detail.chiebukuro.yahoo.co.jp/qa/question_detail/q105... )

by austinz 12y ago

Tomte 12y ago

Some. I know that not every letter has been Han-unified, but I don't know the specifics. Is it possible, that this problem of yours has actually been taken care of? If not, is it possible that it's just a mistake instead of a big evil conspiracy?

com2kid 12y ago
AFAIK it was a historical attempt to save on encoding space back when Unicode had a 16bit fixed width and could only support up to 65K characters. Now that Unicode has expanded out, I am confused why anyone still defends this practice.
- Tomte 12y ago
  That's just one of the reasons people had (and you can't really expect everyone involved to have totally congruent reasons). But how about "g"? Do you really believe the two common variants (one storey/two stories) should have separate code points? What about German vs. French vs. Danish vs. etc.? All different "g"? Why? And if not, what is the core difference?
  - 1ris 12y ago
    The Cyrillic R (looks like P) and and Greek Roh (also looks like P) and the Latin P are not unified either. Although I think unifying some Greek and Cyrillic letters would have made sense.

vilhelm_s 12y ago

Simplified and traditional characters have different unicode codepoints. Japanese and mainland simplifications have different codepoints when they differ, and Japanese-only characters of course have their own codepoints. The argument is about characters like 冷. It is given a single codepoint, but Chinese typefaces draw the bottommost stroke diagonally, and Japanese typefaces tend to draw it vertically. (When writing it by hand, both versions are acceptable in Japanese also, http://detail.chiebukuro.yahoo.co.jp/qa/question_detail/q1055414995 http://detail.chiebukuro.yahoo.co.jp/qa/question_detail/q105... )