Subject: Big5 and OTHER Guobiao

From: "L.S.Ng" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 22 Nov 1993 18:15:36 GMT

>From lsn Mon Nov 22 18:12:15 1993
Date: Mon, 22 Nov 93 18:12:15 GMT
To: [email-masked]
Subject: Re: Big5 & Guobiao(s)
In-Reply-To: <no.id>; from "Stephen G Simpson" at Nov 21, 93 7:41 pm
X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.3 PL11]

>From the posting by John Delacour the other day, we learned that there
are in fact many Guobiao Coding subsets already defined.

The Chinese Name for GB2312-80 is 'Ji1-Ben3-Ji2' which means 'Basic
Set', from which I gather that it is the smallest subsets of all Guobiao
coding sets. Futher, I infer that the PRC Government has in foresight
lay down the coding scheme for many possible applications, well
including the Traditional Character sets for research purposes.

But the question I would like to ask is where can we find the Bitmap
fontfile (or better, scaleable) for other 'BIGGER' Guobiao?

(The fullname for GB2312 is Zhonghua Renming Gongheguo - Guajia Biaozun
                              China  People  Republic  National Standard

- Xinxi   Jiaohuan   Yong - Hanzi Bianma     Zi4      Fu3    Ji2
  "Info" "Exchange""Purpose"             "Character""Symbol""Set"

..cont..  *** Ji1 Ben3 Ji2 ***)

> 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.

Your 'guess' seems to base on some prejudice over the PRC Government
:-) This hypothesis sounded superb. But I prefer a gentler alternative.

IMO, the popularity of Guobiao 2312 i.e.  the BASIC SET is due to its
size :-) It the olden days of PC XT, each disk is 360K.  Most PC has
only one or two 360 floppy disk drive.  So each GB2312 fontfile (aboout
250K) would fit in nicely into a disk.  It have been TEN good years ever
since the publication of GB2312 (in 1980) until better PC fitted with
hard-disk get popular.  In the meantime, GB2312 has become the de facto
standard for 'the rest of China'.

On the contrary, in Big5 coding scheme, some vendors (e.g.  Eten) chose
to use a 16x15 character bitmap instead of a 16x16.  This save 2 bytes
per character.  So each 16x15 character occupy 30 bytes.  Say there are
about 14000 characters in Big5 (sorry to Bruce Liu, my memory is quite
bad, I couldn't remember the exact number most of the time).

So this would made up to about 420K.  The saving in using 16x15 instead
of 16x16 is about 28K.  And in the early versions of Eten, (even up to
ver 3.0), the bitmap fontfile were split into multiple files for dubious
reasons.  And now I guess it is because the character set is too big!!

It is good for the PRC government to have thought of using a smaller
set. And I believe that they have already BIGGER set of Guobiao. (in
use?? perhaps someone from China can clarify this?)

On the other hand, the Taiwanese has Big5 as the SMALLEST set and this
decision has given them a lot of trouble. (Of course, the merit is that
now Big5 is the de facto for traditional characters; It could well be
other Bigger Guobiao(s))

For example, Big5 has to use a 15 bit coding scheme (Highbyte 7-bit,
lowbyte 8-bit) which makes it incompatible with the good old SMTP
(Simple Mail Transfer Protocol).  While baby Guobiao2123 use a 14 bit
coding (Highbyte 7-bit, Lowbyte 7-bit), it happily adapts to the world
of email.  This applies both to HZ coding and GB coding.  For example,
even if I forget to save a mail in HZ coding, and I save it in GB coding
instead: when the mail get transferred, only the High Bit get strip, and
alas, it doesn't matter, now it becomes HZ code.  So I can happily
decode it.

The other trouble is 'Wan4 Ma3 Beng1 Teng2' (Ten Thousand of Coding
schemes [pronounce same as Horse] ...) due to no National Regulation
(Enforcement of law) on Coding Scheme. But I believe that this problem
could well be negligible now as Big5 seems to be accepted publicly.

Sincerely
Liangsheng WU