Subject: which one is more popular?

From: Rupert Zhu <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 7 Feb 91 01:37:19 EST

Hi, Friends:  Now we have to Guo Biao under consideration.  One is
the "pure GB", the other is "popular GB".

Pure GB uses ASCII 7-bit characters 33 to 127 inclusive.  Note that
ASCII 127 is a non-printable control character and has a chance to
corrupt during E-mail transmission.  When handling a mix of Chinese
text with English, some more control characters have to be put
in, therefore higher chance to be caught in trouble during transmission.

Another fundamental question is:  Which GB scheme is more widely
used in various Chinese wordprocessors and device drivers ?

For PC hardware, the popular GB scheme is prevailing.
On UNIX minicomputer, virtually none of the two GB is used.
I have no idea about the VMS machines, X-windows and MacIntosh
machines.  Can anyone shed some light for me?

I am trying to find some convincing reasons showing that direct
pure GB transmission is superior than the proposed "popular GB + uuencode"
transmission.  But so far, I have not been convinced.

-- Rupert

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From: "Stephen G. Simpson" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 7 Feb 91 12:33:32 -0500

Mark Leisher wrote:

> 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.

Well, not completely safe, because even some of the printable ASCII
characters (33 to 126) are not handled correctly in EBCDIC.  This
implies that your file can get corrupted if your mail path goes
through an IBM mainframe running VM.  Fortunately, Internet mail is
not usually gatewayed through IBM mainframes.

Mark's comments make a lot of sense to me.  The CCDOS format (i.e.
GuoBiao with both high bits set to 1, what Rupert Zhu has been calling
"popular GuoBiao") will not work at all because the mailers will strip
the high bits.  Even CCDOS + UUENCODE is not completely safe, again
because of the EBCDIC problem.  Also, as Ed Lai pointed out, a major
disadvantage of UUENCODE, ATOB, etc. is that the files cannot be
displayed or printed before decoding.

> 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.

This problem exists, but it can be solved.  The most elegant solution
I have seen was proposed and implemented by Fung Fung Lee, Ricky
Yeung, and others.  Namely, the HZ standard.  Roughly speaking, the
idea of HZ is to enclose 7-bit GuoBiao between brackets that look like
~{ and ~}.  Here the tilde ~ functions as an escape character.  In
this way, 7-bit GuoBiao can be mixed with ASCII.  The ASCII parts of
the file are immediately readable on any ASCII terminal.  The GuoBiao
parts are immediately readable (and printable) using any software that
understands GuoBiao.

Documentation and software implementing the HZ standard is available
for anonymous ftp on june.cs.washington.edu.  There are simple
utilities to print HZ files, display them on X-Windows, and convert
between HZ and other file formats (including CCDOS and BIG-5).

Mark, can you see any drawbacks to HZ as a proposed standard for
Chinese e-mail?  I see only two.

First, HZ files use all of the printable ASCII characters, hence are
not handled correctly by IBM mainframes using EBCDIC.  But, as I said
above, this problem is not really very severe.

Second, HZ is based on GuoBiao, hence can't transmit traditional
Chinese characters correctly.  For example, any GuoBiao-based
transmission standard will confuse the traditional characters Mian4
("face") and Mian4 ("noodle"), because they correspond to one and the
same simplified character.  This problem is serious, because most of
the international Chinese community uses traditional characters.

Perhaps what we really need is another transmission standard, similar
to HZ but based on BIG-5 instead of GuoBiao.  That way everybody could
be happy.  The files could be displayed or printed correctly in either
traditional or simplified characters.  This could be done without
decoding or conversion of any kind.  The only problem would be that,
in order to edit the files with a GuoBiao-based editor (such as Byx),
you would need conversion utilities.  But the needed utilities are
available on june.cs.washington.edu.

Comments?

---

From: "J. Ding" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 7 Feb 91 15:57:40 CST

While everyone is arguing which method is super, which is poor, I noticed
that Rupert wants to take a real step forward to get the project going.

I also noticed that the similar topic seems extensively discussed back as
early as two years ago. Can anyone give me(a new comer) some idea of what
kind of real development has achieved or is it still a discussing topic?.
Specificly, any pilot scheme(no matter how good or bad) has been tested/adopted
among significant amount of people? How far has the HZ scheme reached?

Thanks to Prof. Seiichi Nomura here at UTA, I had a chance to look at the
Japanese E-mail news system. As Mark said in his mail yesterday, the Japanese
used <Esc>$B and <Esc>(B to block the Japanese from English. It may not be the
best but it is working. They also make several public domain software to push
the readers' market. For example, a PC based viewer (kermit interface) was
available for anonymous FTP.

I would like to see that some agreement could be reached asap for further
steps. Also more important, the project need people to donate time and skill.

I personaly prefer the Pure GuoBiao with certain escape(like zW and HZ). My
major argument is user interface/convenience. While most e-mail is still
relying on mainframe, most Chinese text displays rely on Vedio User Interface
(PC) or Graphic User Interface(Mac). An real time interface between VUI/GUI
and mainframe output is essencial. You can't expect users to read a message
by going through downloading, decoding, running CCDOS(or BYX) and finally
getting himself a garbage "Test" message. Offline coding/decoding will make
life really painful. So the pure GuoBiao scheme is preferable in my point of
view.

I don't know if such a viewer already existed. Yawei's real time viewer is
impressive, but its CC-DOS dependence makes a complicated world. Software
independence will be a better approach. Containing its own 16x16 fonts, the
TSR viewer should be made freeware along with one or two text converting
program for CC-DOS or BYX etc.(a piece of cake since they all Guobiao based).
If it gets popular, those Chinese software developers(CCDOS or BYX) will take
care of the futher interface work to promote their market. My point is simple,
devote some time to get a freeware viewer to first get as many users to READ
Chinse(in the format of news or something) to create a potential user market.
Leaving the good input/print function taken care of by commercial people.

Again, I appreciate Rupert's intention to push the project moving forward
and looking forward to working with some enthusiastic guys to get something
done.

Jian Ding
Computer Support Specialist                   B366JDX@UTARLVM1
Library -- U. Texas at Arlington              [email-masked]