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I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode

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Re: I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode

#81

Post by cplease »

com2kid wrote: post #8
angersock wrote: post #2

I came in expecting to read an article bemoaning some niche language and playing the diversity card. I was not disappointed, but as I kept reading, the author made some very good points. I don't really care that the organization is run by white men who speak English, because frankly the entire computing industry and telecommunications industry is based on that. I'm not going to argue about the original sin there, bec…

Han unification makes things really hard for programmers. You end up with code that tries to guess what language a string is in to pick out which character set should be used! It is an absolute nightmare and a horrid idea.

You don't determine language based on codepage. I give you ASCII text; what language is it?

Re: I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode

#82

Post by frivoal »

Navarr wrote: post #68
mehta wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [...] CJK unification[...] has never been a point of contention in the communities concerned with it. I am not very familar with the CJK unification project so take my points with a grain of salt. > more than not opposing CJK unification, I benefit from it greatly. I think think that is a different point of view. Isn't it? You are seeing your benefit whereas the author is seeing his. Here's an alternative solution:…

The example characters expressed: 日、中、力 however are written the same way in both Chinese and Japanese from my understanding. (Albeit, I studied Japanese). There are admittedly variations which should be done separately, however unification of visually identical glyphs is a "good thing" imho

I'm fluent in Japanese and speak some Mandarin Chinese as well. These 3 characters are identical, not similar.

For a different example, 国 and 國 used to be the same character, but China and Japan (left) have both diverged the traditional form still used in Taiwan (right). Unicode treats them as separate.

今 Looks slightly different in traditional Chinese vs other languages. In traditional Chinese, the little straight line between the two angled lines is sloped, while it is horizontal in simplified Chinese, Japanese or Korean. Any reader of any of these languages would have no issue if the variant they are used to was replaced by the other one. They might think you have a sloppy handwriting or an ugly font if they even notice, but that's about it. Unicode treats them as the same.

Re: I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode

#84

Post by EdiX »

bbreier wrote: post #13
nemo wrote: post #4

I wonder if the author has submitted a proposal to get the missing glyph for their name added. You don't need to be a member of the consortium to propose adding a missing glyph/updating the standard. The point of the committee as I understand it isn't to be an expert in all forms of writing, but to take the recommendations from scholars/experts and get a working implementation, though more diverse representation of l…

The author's explanation of what characters Chinese, Japanese, and Korean share is very limited. All three languages use Chinese characters in written language to varying extents, and in some cases the differences begin significantly less than a century ago. Though there are cases where the same Chinese character represented in Japanese writing is different from how it is represented in Traditional Chinese writing (i…

> If they are talking about unifying these alphabets, then they are out of their minds.

AFAIK the author is just discussing han unification:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification

Re: I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode

#85

Post by [deleted] »

mlmonkey wrote: post #33
shkkmo wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So blame the indian government for any problems with ISCII. The problems with Unicode support for global languages are indeed to be blamed on the Unicord Consortium. Nothing the indian governemnt did prevents the UC from availing themselves of the global knowledge needed to create a good global standard.

do you have any evidence that the UC has actively ignored requests from Bengali speakers? Has any Bengali speaker made proposals to the UC for fixing these issues? If yes, and the UC chose to ignore them, then there is some blame to be assigned with the UC. Otherwise, this is a non-issue. Take, for example, Tibetan. The number of Tibetan speakers is minuscule compared to, say, Bengali. But still Tibetan has good supp…

[deleted]

Re: I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode

#86

Post by konstruktor »

angersock wrote: post #2

I came in expecting to read an article bemoaning some niche language and playing the diversity card. I was not disappointed, but as I kept reading, the author made some very good points. I don't really care that the organization is run by white men who speak English, because frankly the entire computing industry and telecommunications industry is based on that. I'm not going to argue about the original sin there, bec…

I can't think of any telecommunication or computing device that I own or have touched in the last few years that was built by white, English speaking men.

Regarding software, I googled a bit to find numbers, and one of the first articles actually giving numbers says 19 percent of software developers are in the largest English speaking country, the US: http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/european-technology/there-a...

Re: I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode

#87

Post by com2kid »

frivoal wrote: post #70
angersock wrote: post #2

I came in expecting to read an article bemoaning some niche language and playing the diversity card. I was not disappointed, but as I kept reading, the author made some very good points. I don't really care that the organization is run by white men who speak English, because frankly the entire computing industry and telecommunications industry is based on that. I'm not going to argue about the original sin there, bec…

Han unification has been overly aggressive about merging some characters, but the basic principle is not as flawed as it is some times (as in this article) made to sound. The vast majority of Japanese and Chinese characters are not only similar, they are identical. Not all are. Some are clearly different characters deriving from a common historical root, and should not be unified. Sometimes, when characters are a bit…

> The vast majority of Japanese and Chinese characters are not only similar, they are identical. Not all are. Some are clearly different characters deriving from a common historical root, and should not be unified.

And what about traditional versus simplified? Which glyph set do I use? Oh wait, thanks to Han unification, I now need to rely on bloody environment variables to decide!

For Chinese text, rendering a string of text involves not just the string, but also the local runtime. Joy of joys.

> You don't want a in German and a in English to be different letters just because Helvetica and Baskerville look different.

If following the spec means my users become partially illiterate then there are problems with the spec.

Re: I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode

#88

Post by cplease »

_yosefk wrote: post #76
cplease wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hebrew (and I'd guess Arabic and other right-to-left languages) work rather badly in Unicode when it comes to bidirectional rendering; however, to the extent that it's a result of Israeli/Egyptian/Saudi/etc. companies and/or governments failing to pay $18K (the figure from TFA) to pay for the consortium membership I'm sorry? How does this have anything to do with encoding, versus software toolkits? Unicode and enco…

Unicode defines a "logical order" and a "rendering order". The logical order is supposed to be the order in which you read the text - letters read earlier are closer to the beginning of the buffer. The rendering order is how the stuff appears on screen - where an English word inside Hebrew text, if you count the letters from right to left, will obviously have its last letter assigned a smaller number than its first l…

Okay, how would you do it? If you want bidirectional mixed language support, you're not going to get around implementing bidi rendering at some layer. Character encoding is not that layer. You are making legitimate complaints, but they are largely in the realm of poor internationalization support. There may be finger-pointing between applications, toolkits, and OS middleware, but the character encoding should not be taking the bum rap for that.

Internationalization is a fundamentally difficult engineering problem and no character encoding is going to solve it.

Re: I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode

#89

Post by com2kid »

cplease wrote: post #81
com2kid wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Han unification makes things really hard for programmers. You end up with code that tries to guess what language a string is in to pick out which character set should be used! It is an absolute nightmare and a horrid idea.

You don't determine language based on codepage. I give you ASCII text; what language is it?

BINGO.

But because of Han unification I all of a sudden DO need to know the language.

The same Unicode code point needs to be rendered differently for a user in Mainland China versus a user in Japan or else the user may not be able to read the text! Even if the user can read the character, they are going to experience a degradation in reading speed and comprehension, and be generally frustrated. Not to mention showing the wrong character is insensitive to the customer's culture, and if I pick to and stick just one set of characters to use, I end up (being accused at least of) promoting cultural hegemony based on which character set I go with.

Re: I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode

#90

Post by a2tech »

Ok, we all understand it sucks. Whats the fix? You think Unicode is racist and terrible. Its stupidly difficult to work with for sure, but racist is a stretch.

What do you propose? More complexity layered on a system that people don't understand isn't really a fix.

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