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Björn De Meyer wrote:
Exactly. Unicode doesn't even support the full range of (Chinese) Kanji characters used in Japanese. Unicode was in the beginning an evil microsoft invention, in which they tries to implement all languages in just 65000 characters. Problem being that Japanese alone knows 80000 Kanji characters. Even now, the so called "CJK unification", that is in essence, the dumbing down of both Japanese, Chinese and Japanese ideographs is causing much discomfort in Asia... Unfortunately, in the free software world, the illusion lives that Unicode is the derfinitive solution to the internationalisation problem.

This seems like misinformation. From what I understand, unicode has a 31 bit space, and only about 21 bits of that is required to cover all characters in use today. As for using unicode for Japanese, certainly it is possible and works well, as I've personally deployed unicode with UTF-8 encoding at Japanese websites.

Perhaps your experience is with some naive *encoding* of unicode that tries to stuff 21 bits into 16? ;-)

I use the Unix Unicode FAQ for reference (http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html).


-John




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