Subject: GB and GangXi ZiDian

From: XiaoFei Wang <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 2 Nov 1991 17:56:13 EST

Scott Horne has expressed his opinion in a scholarly manner.
As a non-scholar, I do not think GB is designed for sending
telegrams.

True that few people cite ancient literature in telegram. But a lot of
people have names which  uses ancient characters. in BYX 1.* Yang
YongXin typed an open letter and he could not find several characters
in GB for people's names. I don't know how the post service handle the
problem if someone's name is not in the GB or telecode if they are not
the same.

I hope to see more scholars express their opinions.

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From: Huangxin Wang <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 2 Nov 1991 18:30:38 EST

I think BYX1.* uses a smaller set of character (that the regular GB).
For example, it cannot find the characters of my name (xin), but no
such problem with Mac (containing all the GB characters, about 7000).

But you problem will definitely occur if you start working on this
project.  Since the crucial point is that we start this project first
then iron out this details, what I suggest is whenever you encounter
these difficult characters, use pinyin instead.  This will also help
because very often when we are reading classics, we encounter this
kind of character that we cannot even pronounce.

Just as a long shoot, by using both pinyin and characters, this can make
Chinese getting more and more flexible.  Some of the difficult characters
will slowly phase out replaced by pinyin.  This will be a more pratical
scheme of chinese romanization, than the radical way of total abandon
chinese characters.

In any way, our first goal is to get this project (collecting chinese
classics) rolling first.

Huangxin Wang 王璜鑫, University of Pennsylvania

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From: YA-GUI WEI <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 2 Nov 1991 22:54:42 EST

It is quite true that it is impossible to represent all possible
Chinese characters that ever existed or will come into existence.
What is needed is a standard language to describe characters
that cannot be found in a standard character set.  Since most
Chinese characters are construted with a few rules, it is possible
to describe most if not all charcters with a set of simple rules.

For example, we can, for a character with left->right construction,
say \zhao4 lin2 (character, character, ...), etc.

A program for producing hard or soft copies of the character can
then interpret the descriptions and construct the image of the
characters as needed.

Let me elaborate my proposed rules in Chinese (zW):

zWHgR;DQWVN*WsSR=a99#,SC#:
zW  #\TlAV#(WVAP#)
zW@}#:  TlAV#(TB#)  #=  Es
zW      TlAV#(:ZRt#)#=  wv
zW      5H!#

zWHgR;DQWVN*IOOB=a99#,SC#:
zW  #\TlB@#(WVAP#)
zW@}#:
zW      TlB@#(P!4sP!#)  #=  fY
zW      5H!#

zWFdK|=a99#:
zW  #\TlV.#(8f#)#=Tl  5H
zW  #\Tl9z#(An#)#=`r  5H

Using these rules recursively one can specify most Chinese characters:

zW  #\TlB@#(?Z#\TlAV#(?Z?Z#)#)  #=  F7
zW  5H!#

We can also specify some derived rules as short hands:

zW  #\TlF7#(HK#)  #=  VZ      5H

Using these rules, even if your software is unable to interpret the
rules and construct the correct characters, it is easy for the
user to guess the intended character.

  Ya-Gui

Correction: I guess the pinyin for zWTl should be "zao4" instead.