Re: Unicode console font

[PILCH Hartmut <phm@a2e.de>]

I just stumbled across something Thomas Chan wrote on Sept 13th:

> The CJK style variation (or whatever it'll be called in the final version)
> should be named by locale.  The "simplified Chinese" vs. "traditional
> Chinese" distinction is a misnomer, unless it's being used as a synonym
> for the zh_CN and zh_TW locales respectively.

The locale distinction is perhaps even more misleading. Traditional
Chinese characters are used on the mainland for some purposes, and
sometimes they even represent styles.  Within one text, one can have a
"traditional style" for the headings and a "simplified style" for the text
bodies.  Or one for quotations and the other for commentaries.

Also, there are places outside China where none of two variants dominates.
The situation with Japanese is similar.  The JIS character set actually
contains both the reformed and the unreformed characters, and both appear
as style variants in some texts.  Nobody would define them as "Japanese
homeland" vs "South-American Japanese" locale (some south-american
Japanese newspapers have not gone along with the reform). 

When you start switching between "locales" within one text, the locale
just becomes a special kind of style.

Maybe this is also one of the confusing problems that become less important
when there is a unified encoding system.

-phm

 

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