Subject: Re: which one is more popular?

From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 7 Feb 91 01:42:54 MST

Actually, pure GuoBiao is 33 to 126 for each byte.  This means 0x2121
through 0x7e7e is the range of pure GuoBiao and 0xa1a1 through 0xfefe
is the range of "popular" GuoBiao.

As I mentioned before, I think pure GuoBiao is the way to go, because
it consists of the "safe" characters to send by email.

So if pure GuoBiao is to be used as a transmission standard, there
needs to be some way of indicating which parts of a document are
supposed to be GuoBiao, and which parts are supposed to be ASCII.
This is where the problems start.

The Japanese use ^[$B (^[ == escape) to start a Kanji string and ^[(B
to end a Kanji string.  But as Ed Lai pointed out sometime earlier,
the escape character presents problems also.  There was a discussion
on sci.lang.japan on reconstructing text that had the escape
characters stripped, and there was no good solution presented.

In a Unix environment, there doesn't seem to be much of a problem
transmitting the escape character, but on Mac/PC based BBS's, and
other phone connection activities, it can be a problem.

The ^N (Shift Out) ^O (Shift In) sequences are used for Korean Hangul
N-byte text, but I don't know if it causes problems in transmission.
I suppose I should check on this.

Perhaps using "popular" GuoBiao with uuencode/xxencode/btoa would be a
handy temporary solution, but its not a "satisfying" solution :-)

Maybe a solution will be easier to arrive at when an international
standard character set (ISO/IEC DIS 10646 or Unicode) is introduced.
The ISO/IEC DIS 10646 draft mentions that there is an effort to make
one standard from a number of existing Chinese standards, including
GuoBiao.
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[email-masked]                      "I laughed.
Mark Leisher                                I cried.
Computing Research Lab                          I fell down.
New Mexico State University                        It changed my life."
Las Cruces, NM                     - Rich [Cowboy Feng's Space Bar and Grille]

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From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 7 Feb 91 01:42:54 MST