At 23:28 -0800 2002-11-13, Doug Ewell wrote:
That is exactly one point as to why there is no simple solution: Simplified and Traditional weren't unified. I apologise for not stating it more clearly. Moreover, although I am a tyro in Chinese, and only know Japanese from a dictionary, I have come across several dozen Japanese forms that are the equivalent simplified forms used in Mainland Chinese: these pairs are not unified.George W Gerrity <ggerrity at dragnet dot com dot au> wrote:The problems occur first, because the code scanner can no longer be stateless; second, because one needs to provide an over-ride to higher-level layout engines; third, because it can't solve problems where multiple glyphs exist, whose use is highly context-dependent, as is the case for some Japanese texts; and fourth, because there is no one-one translation between the (largely) non-unified simplified and traditional characters in Chinese.Careful on that last point. The Chinese vs. Japanese glyph problem has nothing to do with the simplified vs. traditional Chinese character equivalence problem. In particular, Unicode makes no attempt to unify "equivalent" SC and TC characters, because such equivalence is not 1-to-1 except for a few thousand relatively basic pairs; plus the equivalence would only be valid for Chinese, not for other languages that use Han characters (Japanese, older Korean, Vietnamese nôm). SC and TC characters are completely non-unified, unless you want to count the few that are the simplified forms of some character and also the traditional form of some other character.
George
