Re: Is there anybody interested in supporting GB18030 in debian?
On Tue, 23 Jan 2001 suzhe@gnuchina.org wrote:
> Yes, the UTF-8/UCS4 is the ultimate solution for all of us. But why most
> of us are not using it? Why most of chinese guys are still using
> GB2312/BIG5?
I think the reason is habit and a lot of legacy software. A lot of people
don't even know they can use GBK for fantizi, but think they have to
switch to using a different character set/encoding (Big5).
But what makes you think that many people are still using GB2312 or GBK or
Big5? Many businesses have been creating UCS-2 data for 3+ years
now, simply by using Microsoft's Office suite.
> The most important benefit of GB18030 is the GB2312/GBK users do not need
> convert there data/archieves from GB2312/GBK to other encoding to gain the
> ability of processing many different languages simultaneously. And they
> can convert there data from GB18030 to UTF-8 without losing anything, when
> UTF-8/UCS4 is used widely.
I think that is the only benefit of GB18030.
There is a serious problem if everyone is waiting for someone else to
start using UTF-8 (or UTF-16, etc) "widely", because then it will never
happen.
> I think it will not only waste some CPU cycles but lots of money and time
> for most of the chinese guys to convert there data from GB2312/GBK to
> UTF-8! It's indeed a hard work! We cannot expect most of the GB2312/GBK
> users converting to use UTF-8 in a night or a year!
And how much more will it cost after you have an extra year's worth of
documents to convert?
Thomas Chan
tc31@cornell.edu
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