On 2018/03/09 10:17, Philippe Verdy via Unicode wrote:
This still leaves the question about how to write personal names ! IDS alone cannot represent them without enabling some "reasonable" ligaturing (they don't have to match the exact strokes variants for optimal placement, or with all possible simplifications). I'm curious to know how China, Taiwan, Singapore or Japan handle this (for official records or in banks): like our personal signatures (as digital images), and then using a simplified official record (including the registration of romanized names)?
This question seems to assume more of a difference between alphabetic and ideographic traditions. A name in ideographs, in the same way as a name in alphabetic characters, is defined by the characters that are used, not by stuff like stroke variants, etc. And virtually all names, even before the introduction of computers, and even more after that, use reasonably frequent characters.
The difference, at least in Japan, is that some people keep the ideograph before simplification in their official records, but they may or may not insist on its use in everyday practice. In most cases, both a traditional and a simplified variant are available. Examples are 広/廣, 高/髙, 崎/﨑, and so on. I regularly hit such cases when grading, because our university database uses the formal (old) one, where students may not care about it and enter the new one on some system where they have to enter their name by themselves.
Apart from that, at least in Japan, signatures are used extremely rarely; it's mostly stamped seals, which are also kept as images by banks,...
Regards, Martin.
