(keitai-l) Kanji, Hanzi and Unicode

I'm a little confused here how Unicode increases the number
of characters that need to be encoded. My understanding is
that Unicode only encodes characters, while a character's
physical or visual representation is provided by glyphs
whose delivery is provided by the fonts one selects.

And that under Han Unification of CJK, the required number of
encoded characters is actually greatly reduced, whereby you
have one code point for "ki", no matter if that "ki" character
is written differently in Kanji (Japanese) Hanja (Korean) or
Hanzi (Simplified or Traditional Chinese).

And then your desired glyph is delivered by the font you select.


At 04:42 PM 6/20/02 +0900, you wrote:


>On Thursday, June 20, 2002, at 02:01 , Curt Sampson wrote:
>
>
> >  and new ones are being invented all the time.
>
>I don't think there are that many new characters being invented. In fact
>writing reforms in China and Japan has aimed to cut down on the number
>of characters. That's why you have simplified Chinese (used in Mainland
>China) and traditional Chinese (used in Hong Kong and Taiwan) character
>sets, which ironically, from a Unicode standard point to view has
>increased the number of characters that need to be encoded.
>
>For example the character for spirit "Ki" has three different
>representations, one simplified, one traditional and a Japanese version.
>  From a Unicode point of view those are three different characters, but
>they are actually one:
>
>Traditional Chinese "Qi" : $B]f(B
>Japanese "Ki" : $B5$(B
>Simplified Chinese "qi" : $B]c(B
>(PS: You need all thee coding systems and fonts installed to see the
>characters)
>

James Santagata
  A U D I E N C E T R A X
  Audience Management Systems