From: ishikawa@personal-media.co.jp (Chiaki Ishikawa)
Newsgroups: comp.std.internat
Subject: Re: Radicals Instead of Characters
Date: 21 Jan 93 12:03:06 GMT
	<ISHIKAWA.93Jan18203811@ds5200.personal-media.co.jp>
	<1j9sfpINN46t@life.ai.mit.edu> <1jfgq1INNqmn@flop.ENGR.ORST.EDU>
Reply-To: ishikawa@personal-media.co.jp
Organization: Personal Media Corp., Tokyo Japan
In-reply-to: crowl@jade.CS.ORST.EDU's message of 19 Jan 93 00:08:19 GMT
X-Md4-Signature: 742372585638ed37c6db744fa8a57fdc


Sorry for my late followup.

In article <1jfgq1INNqmn@flop.ENGR.ORST.EDU> crowl@jade.CS.ORST.EDU (Lawrence Crowl) writes:

   In article <ISHIKAWA.93Jan18203811@ds5200.personal-media.co.jp>
   ishikawa@personal-media.co.jp writes:
   >(There are many Kanji characters that were NOT put into JIS because
   >they are no longer used in modern day Japan.)

   Was representing historical documents a goal of JIS?  I presume not.

No, it was not. But, UNICODE and its sibling seems to. [at least some
old characters are now incorporated.]

   The question I was asking was "can you _identify_ a han/kanji character
   based on a sequence of radicals" and "would it be reasonable to encode
   han/kanji on that basis".  I'm fully expect presentation devices (laser
   printers, crts, etc.) to recognize a sequence of radicals and choose a
   predrawn glyph for the entire character.

Yes, you can. However, again, some characters used in China MAY have 
the same set of radicals in different position and you may need
additional information to differentiate them. [Is there any Chinese
reader here? I think to check whether such character exists or
not is a big effort in itself.]

   >Again, it probably is true that you can use the radicals to specify a Kanji
   >character in Japan for CODING PURPOSES.  However, the number of such
   >combinations are big enough and we may be better off with JIS or some
   >such coding.

   I don't understand why the number of combinations of radicals would
   make such a coding less attractive.  Isn't this the same as saying the
   number of combinations of english letters is very large and hence
   unattractive?

Well, to confess, my original point was not so much from the
techinical point.  [Excpet for the possibility of hypothetical
conflicting characters in terms of radicals alone.] I would rather not
see a new wheel invented if we can do away with designing new wheels.

   Good point.  This point is also true of English, where the spacing of
   letters can depend on the context.  I never intended that Kanji appear
   as isolated radicals jammed together.

I heaved a sigh of relief when I read this :-)

   >Only when in Japanese lesson or under some such setting where we are
   >faced with the history of Kanjis, or trying to learn how to read an
   >unfamiliar kanji., we are made aware of the composition of Kanji in
   >terms of radicals.

   I am not saying that people need to key in radicals or observe the
   internal representation.  If normal people can understand the basis of
   the coding, so much the better.

I generally agree on this point. However, on second thought, it may
not be necessary. After all, we can supplement a standard with
commercial handbooks if someone wanted to locate a Kanji in the code
table. Such books have appeared in Japan. Again, radicals at least in
Japan are not so heavily used, I suppose. [But, again, some teachers
in schools might disagree with me. Difficulty in desigining some
technical standard with natural languages is that the assumption about
the language usage held by one engineer is probably much different
from other engineers' and that the assumptions held by engineers and
people involved in standardization efforts may be different from that
of general population. This difference may be ignorable in many cases,
but can result in a resistence. I can think of a stupid JIS keyboard
standard design decision which had to be corrected about 10 years
later. In the meanwhile, the keyboard based on JIS was detested by
touch typists and many company produced non-JIS keyboards. So much for
official standard.]

   >I feel today that emphasis seemed to have been lighter on the
   >representation issue than my liking, but I digress.

   Hence my push for thinking of two separate codes.  But, that's another
   thread.

Interesting to know that someone has similar notion about the code
design decision and the emphasis on outlook of text.

 Chiaki Ishikawa,  Personal Media Corp.,  MY Bldg, 1-7-7 Hiratsuka,
 Shinagawa, Tokyo 142, JAPAN. FAX:+81-3-5702-0359, Phone:+81-3-5702-0351
 UUNET: ishikawa@personal-media.co.jp