Subject: Re: Big5

From: Stephen G Simpson <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 21 Nov 1993 19:41:20 -0500

To: Susan Lasovick <[email-masked]>

 > I would be very interested to know the proportion of GB in use in Hong
 > Kong

I don't have any solid information here.  Why not post this question
on CCNET?

One relevant fact is that GB-2312-1980 is unsuitable for traditional
Chinese characters.  Since almost all printed Chinese documents in
Hong Kong use traditional characters, I would guess that GB is not
widely used, for practical reasons.  Of course this may change after
the PRC takeover.

The PRC government is rumored to have GB extensions which handle
traditional Chinese characters.  However, I have never seen any fonts
for these extensions, nor have I seen any software that uses these
extensions.  My guess is that the PRC government wants to discourage
the use of traditional characters and therefore restricts their use to
special printing houses that print documents for foreign consumption,
e.g. the overseas edition of People's Daily.  The fonts are therefore
not available to the general public.

 > When you say 'stick to the ETEN coding,' do you mean the ETEN
 > coding itself or the base standard Big5?

The Eten coding scheme consists of the base standard Big5 plus some
useful extensions which cover Japanese Kana, Cyrillic, etc.  Certainly
you should implement Big5, but if I were you I would also implement
Eten's extensions as much as possible, because Eten is so very
popular.

I imagine that this would be almost a business necessity.  For
example, there is a rival Big5 product similar to Eten, called KC, and
KC has its own set of extensions, different from Eten's.  However KC
bows to Eten by implementing an Eten compatibility mode, in which
Eten's extensions override KC's extensions.

Incidentally, there are freely available Unicode tables which give the
mappings from GB, Big5, etc. into Unicode.

-- Steve Simpson