Re: [idn] An ignorant question about TC<-> SC

["Mark Davis" <mark@macchiato.com>]

I should try to clarify a few things.

There have been some objections on this list to Han Unification. While there
are often typographic differences between fonts used for Han ideographs in
different countries, what is encoded represents the fundamental character,
as defined by the IRG (Ideographic Raporteur Group). This group reports to
ISO/IEC SC2 WG2, the ISO WG responsible for ISO 10646. As stated elsewhere,
the IRG includes official representatives from China, Japan, the Republic of
Korea and DPR of Korea, Taiwan via the Taipei Computer Society (TCA), Hong
Kong, Singapore, the US, and the Unicode Consortium.
Han unification is mostly irrelevant to the TC <-> SC issue. The major
stumbling block is not that the TCs are unified across different countries,
but that accurate TC<->SC mappings are (a) not 1-1, (b) contextual, (c)
dictionary-based.

If there were a recognized 1-1 subset mapping between SC characters and TC
characters, I don't think unification would be an issue in matching. For
example, it would matter little to Japanese users that an SC character could
be typed in instead of one of their TC characters, so long as two different
TC characters used in Japan were *not* matched. This could be done as long
as the mapping never identifies two different TC characters with the same SC
character.

It should be also made clear that the Unicode consortium is not at all
opposed to the development of a TC <-> SC mapping. However, it is not a
trivial process. The best body to take on that work would be the IRG --
given the composition and expertise of its membership. The process of
arriving at a uniform, well-developed, agreed-upon mapping would probably
take some substantial time, and from that mapping one would have to extract
the 1-1 subset. As stated elsewhere, the consortium has not seen evidence
that such a mapping is required in IDN (given other mechanisms), and does
have considerable concern that it would slow down the IDN development
process even further.