From: glenn@wheat-chex.ai.mit.edu (Glenn A. Adams)
Newsgroups: comp.std.internat
Subject: Re: Dumb Americans (was INTERNATIONALIZATION: JAPAN, FAR EAST)
Date: 25 Jan 93 18:41:33 GMT
Article-I.D.: life.1k1c8tINN8q2
Organization: MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
NNTP-Posting-Host: wheat-chex.ai.mit.edu

In article <ISHIKAWA.93Jan25211508@ds5200.personal-media.co.jp> ishikawa@personal-media.co.jp writes:
>In Japan, if a student put, say, a bar in slightly misplaced
>position in a character or put the bar slightly touching other part of
>the character when it should (NOTE the usage of SHOULD!) not, a student
>can fail a test and required to practice until he/she gets the RIGHT
>(CORRECT) writing.

Yes, I know all of this.  I learned Chinese calligraphy from a well-known
calligrapher of the old school.  Stroke weight, speed, taper, angle,
joins, and, yes, stroke order, were absolutely essential to produce the
"correct" shape (glyph) of the character.

However, you keep missing an essential point here.  Characters != Glyphs.
A character is an abstraction of shape in which *all* non-distinguishing
characteristics are ignored.

A font represents a collection of glyphs, it does not represent a character
set.  A font is used in the display of characters in a character set.  For
example, I might choose a vertical form of a open parenthesis character if
I am display Japanese in vertical mode, or I might choose a horizontal form
if I am displauying in horizontal mode.  Nothing in Unicode tells me which
of these to use.

>But, I can't understand where their priority was during the CJK meeting.
>Wonder why they didn't voice these concerns... My guess is that they really
>didn't bother to think about the mixing of different country's
>character sets. Print company's delegate, for example, would never
>think of using a "standard UNICODE" font at his company, of course.

You are wrong.  They very much understood the issues involved in performing
unification.  First of all, they were not defining a font.  There is no
such thing as a "standard UNICODE font."  A font is a collection of glyphs
which has no necessary relation to a character set.

>I agree that the rich text approach is vital and INDISPENSABLE here. I
>agree on this point. But in assuming the use of additional information
>UNICODE certainly loses some attractiveness in the presense of
>apparent lack of rich text standard that every one uses.  Your points
>about the use of rich text are well taken.

If you want to display Unicode-encoded Japanese text on a simple device
which does not support rich text, then all you have to do is use a font
which displays the expected Japanese glyph when displaying Unicode Han
characters which represent Kanji data.  That's all there is to it, nothing
is complicated about this.

>But, then, I think it is best to say that rich text IS NECESSARY instead of
>assuming the reading skill of modern Japanese.

No, it is not necessary.  Use a Japanese font.  Sure, if you are going to
mix a text with Chinese and Japanese, then you will need to designate fonts
and/or languages.  But, tell me, how many existing devices (or software) do
you know of which will display a mixture of CJK and use the correct fonts
without using any kind of font attributes, language attributes, or some
other kind of rich text.  I do know that the MULE version of Gnu EMACS will
support this, but it marks each character in a buffer according to the
character set it belongs to, and it encodes CJK in separate character sets.
So it does use a kind of rich text (character set attribute).  Furthermore,
if you try to search for the Kanji "nihongo" in a mixed CJK MULE buffer,
you aren't going to get a match on the Hanzi "ribenyu" as one might expect.
By not unifying, MULE allows distinguishing between which font/language,
but it prevents performing searching/sorting and other operations which
might best operate on a unified character set.

CJK unification in Unicode derives the benefit of aiding many common
text processing tasks, while not detracting from current display
technology.  If you want a full multilingual CJK system to do typographically
correct display, then you are going to need rich text no matter which
character set or sets you choose to use.

Glenn Adams