From: mohta@necom830.cc.titech.ac.jp (Masataka Ohta)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd,comp.os.linux
Subject: Re: Dumb Americans (was INTERNATIONALIZATION: JAPAN, FAR EAST)
Keywords: Han Kanji Katakana Hirugana ISO10646 Unicode Codepages
Date: 27 Dec 92 18:47:12 GMT
Followup-To: comp.unix.bsd
Organization: Tokyo Institute of Technology

In article <1992Dec19.083137.4400@fcom.cc.utah.edu>
	terry@cs.weber.edu (A Wizard of Earth C) writes:

>US Engineers produce software for the available market; because of the
>input difficulties involved in 6000+ glyph sets of symbols, there has been
>a marked lack of standardization in Japanese hardware and software. This
>means that the market in Japan consists of mostly "niche" markets, rather
>than being a commodity market.

Do you know what Shift JIS is? It's a defacto standard for charcter encoding
established by microsoft, NEC, ASCII etc. and common in Japanese PC market.

Now, DOS/V from IBM strongly supports Shift JIS.

In the workstation market in Japan, some supports Shift JIS, some
supports EUC and some supports both. Of course, many US companies
sell Japanized UNIX on thier workstations.

>This has changed somewhat with the Nintendo
>corporations recent successes in Japan, where standardized hardware is

I'm sure you are just joking here.

>Microsoft has adopted Unicode as a standard.  It will probably be the
>prevalent standard because of this -- the software world is too wrapped
>up in commodity (read "DOS") hardware for it to be otherwise.  Unicode
>has also done something that XPG4 has not: unified the Far Eastern and
>all other written character sets in a single font, with room for some
>expansion (to the full 16 bits) and a discussion of moving to a full
>32 bit mechanism.

Do you know that Japan vote AGAINST ISO10646/Unicode, because it's not
good for Japanese?

>So even if the Unicode standard ignores backward compatability
>with Japanese standards (and specific American and European standards),
>it better supports true internationalization.

The reason of disapproval is not backward compatibility.

The reason is that, with Unicode, we can't achieve internationalization.

>XPG4, by adopting the JIS standard, appears to be
>igonoring HAN (Chinese) and many other languages covered by the Unicode
>standard.

Unicode can not cover both Japanese and Chinese at the same time, because
the same code points are shared between similar characters in Japan
and in China.

Of course, it is possible to LOCALIZE Unicode so that it produces
Japanese characters only or Chinese characters only. But don't we
need internationalization?

Or, how can I process a text containing both Japanese and Chinese?

>I think that Japaneese
>users (and European and American users, if nothing is done about storage
>encoding to 8 bit sets) are going to have to live with the drawbacks of
>the standard for a very long time (the primary one being two 16K tables
>for input and output for each language representable in 8 bits, and two
>16k tables for runic mapping for languages, like Japaneese, which don't
>fit on keyboards without postprocessing).

What? 16K? Do you think 16K is LARGE?

Then, you know nothing about how Japanese are input. We are happily using
several hundreds kilo bytes or even several mega bytes of electrical
dictionary, even on PCs.

Who, do you think, is the dumb American?

							Masataka Ohta