Subject: banned by law?!

From: GUO Jin <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 3 Mar 1993 11:23:43 +0800

Thanks to Mr. Xu Yueheng for the very informative article posted
to CCNET.  I also cann't help adding a line.

To my knowledge, there never be a LAW on Chinese character coding.
Even has no "hong tou wen jian" on that.  No national internal code
standard exists.

In fact, China is always an active actor in the preparation of CJK
code and a supporter of the unicode (unicode got released only
AFTER China's approval!).

The ORIGINAL GB code as a national standard is ONLY for
"information interchange" purpose and nothing to do with computer
processing.  GB in fact is a double-SEVEN-bit standard (GB has no
definition on the 8th bit or you can say the 8th bit is defined as
zero (0).  The original purpose to develop GB IS to "interchange" on
7bit lines!!!  In certain cense, GB is a super-set to ASCII.)

The double-8th-bit-on internal code (unfortunately being
misleadingly named GB code) is in fact only ONE internal code
adopted by the 6th institute in CCDOS.  The earlier version of
CCDOS (BTW, they never stopped developing new versions of CCDOS,
two years ago, they were promoting CCDOS 4.1 to 4.3, and a chief
developer told me privately they even got donation from UNITED
NATIONS for their efforts in promoting and standarizing of
ShuangPin bottom-up from primary school.  Sorry I have no their
recent versions) also accept other two types of internal codes:
first-8th-bit-on and 4-byte-alphabetical-code.  Even today,
many Chinese word processors accept the first-8th-bit-on
internal code.

On China's market, there are always so many "non-standard" Chinese
computer/computing systems.  Just name a few: IBM5550, WANG MVS.

Then, how to express the "inconsistency" with People's Daily?  In
fact, it's on Chinese character FONTS rather than CODES!

More and more Press/publishing house in China now use computer to do
publishing.  To keep the consistency among publishings (and, I
guess, to stop the revival of traditional Chinese characters),
China has published many national characeter fonts standards.  A
"hong tou wen jian" informed all publishing house to use ONLY
standard character fonts and not to use any non-standard (FONTS)
systems for general publishing.

Furthermore, there is a plan (in action?) to BAN any publishing
(computer) system with no standard fonts (you can add any
non-standard fonts 'for artistic purpose').  This plan has raised so
many argues.  First, the national font standard is from human experts
and artists through traditional dot-by-dot drawing on large paper
matrices.  It's well known that Chinese bitmap fonts are so memory
intensive.  Some kind of font compression is necessary for low
price commercial systems.  But the standard asks distortion-free
compression!  (I heard recently that they have allowed up to
certain percentage distortion.)  Second, those systems developed
in Taiwan, a PRC claimed province, are hard (if not impossible )
to enter the mainland market.  It's just a traditional
protection trick widely in use in, for example, western europe.

Any mistakes, pls let me know.  Thanks.

GuoJin

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From: Yongxin Yan <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 3 Mar 1993 13:25:21 PST

My information seems to support GuoJin's article. I think the font standard
won't stay for long. "GB", however, shall be with us for a long time.

Yan Yong-Xin
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GuoJin