Subject: Question: why these conflicts?

From: Jian Yang <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Sep 1997 11:27:12 -0700

Dear CCNetters,

I am curious to understand the following phenomena:

When using softwares like RichWin and UnionWay on NT plateform, under
applications such as Office97 with Fareast support installed, one can input
and display different languages in the same document or database record or
spreadsheet or whatever allows font switching (since it seems that
language-awareness is linked, at last analysis, to the choice of a relevant
font). But, while inputting western characters with a western font (for
Unicode or not) doesn't disturb the display of already input cjk characters,
the inverse is not true: as soon as one chooses a certain cjk encoding
method to input cjk stuffs, high bit western characters change to garbage;
when one returns to ANSI, everything will be restored correctly. My question
(which may certainly be of great ignorance) is: in a unicode supported
environment like NT, why is it still necessary to use language specific
encoding schemes which are traditionnally known to cause problems between
one byte and two bytes charsets? While there seems to be some script
switching technics that allow triggering appropriate unicode supported fonts
(as is the case with those in UnionWay) to protect different cjk languages
display in a same document, why isn't it yet possible to do the same thing
for western charsets (those of is0-8859-x, which are directly embedded in
unicode, just like many of cjk charsets)? Put it simply: when a platform
uses unicode as internal code, and since there are encoding schemes like
ucs-2 or utf-8, why couldn't one just switch bwteen different input methods
(and perhaps different fonts, as it is difficult to imagine a font covering
all characters coded in Unicode) to input and display different languages in
a document? What kind of difficulties stil remain there to prevent from
doing so? Could someone be so kind as to explane it to me (here or
privately, lengthly or shortly)?

Thanks in advance for any hint!

YANG Jian

[email-masked]