Don't abolish non-unicode locales (Re: support for multilingual Packages files?)

[Tomohiro KUBOTA <tkubota@riken.go.jp>]

Hi,

At Tue, 31 Jul 2001 05:41:00 +0100,
David Starner <dstarner98@aasaa.ofe.org> wrote:

> These aren't problems in using Japanese;

Translation: _you_ don't feel problems in using Japanese.

> they are problems that Japanese
> have using Unicode, frequently due to bugs in Japanese character sets.
> Frankly, I find it hard to blame Unicode for _not_ confusing the Yen sign
> and the backslash.

Please read my page (I imagine you have already read it).
http://www.debian.or.jp/~kubota/unicode-symbols.html
It reads not only yen sign / backslash problem but also many
problems.
 - overline / fullwidth macron
 - em dash / horizonal bar
 - reverse solidus / fullwidth reverse solidus
 - wave dash / fullwidth tilde
 - double vertical line / parallel to
 - minus sign / fullwidth hyphen-minus
 - yen sign / fullwidth yen sign
 - cent sign / fullwidth cent sign
 - pound sign / fullwidth pound sign
 - not sign / fullwidth not sign

Imagine you have a Japanese text written in EUC-JP or Shift_JIS.
You can convert the file into Unicode using various environments
and platforms.  The results differ.  This means you cannot check
the identity of the file using diff and so on.

Note that this problem can be solved technically.  It is politics
among Unicode Consortium-member vendors that prevents the solution.

> Likewise, the doublewidth / singlewidth character problem
> is a problem of Japanese character sets poor-handling of non-Japanese
> characters - you can't ask that Germans use double-width characters for any
> non-ASCII characters.

I understand I can't ask Germans to use double-width characters for
any non-ASCII characters.  Similarly, you can't ask Japanese to use
single-width non-letter-symbols (like triangle, star, rule elements,
and so on) and letters (like Greeks and Cyrillics).

I think you know EastAsianAmbiguous category in Unicode Standard
Annex #11 East Asian Width.
http://www.unicode.org/unicode/reports/tr11/

---
Tomohiro KUBOTA <kubota@debian.org>
http://www.debian.or.jp/~kubota/
"Introduction to I18N"  http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/intro-i18n/