On 2018/03/09 10:22, Philippe Verdy via Unicode wrote:
As well how Chinese/Japanese post offices handle addresses written with sinograms for personal names ? Is the expanded IDS form acceptable for them, or do they require using Romanized addresses, or phonetic approximations (Bopomofo in China, Kanas in Japan, Hangul in Korea) ?
They just see the printed form, not an encoding, and therefore no IDS. Many addresses use handwriting, which has its own variability. Variations such as those covered by IDSes are easily recognizable by people as being the same as the 'base' character, and OCR systems, if they are good enough to decipher handwriting, can handle such cases, too. Romanized addresses will be delivered because otherwise it would be difficult for foreigners to send anything. Pure Kana should work in Japan, although the postal employee will have a second look because it's extremely unusual. For Korea, these days, it will be mostly Hangul; I'm not sure whether addresses with Hanja would incur a delay. My guess would be that Bopomofo wouldn't work in mainland China (might work in Taiwan, not sure).
Regards, Martin.
