Re: Chinese characters support

[Lee Sau Dan <danlee@informatik.uni-freiburg.de>]

>>>>> "Robin" == Robin Hu <huxw@knight.6test.edu.cn> writes:

>>>>> "Lee" == Lee Sau Dan <danlee@informatik.uni-freiburg.de> writes:
>>>>> "Charles" == Charles Muller <acmuller@gol.com> writes:

    Lee> Many people using the CJK parts of Emacs only work with the
    Lee> national encodings (Big5, GB, JIS, KSC, etc.)  and in those
    Lee> cases, they Emacs works excellently.

    Robin>     I think you are over-simpilify this problem. ;-( Most
    Robin> CJK characters are not encoded in either Big5 or GB or JIS
    Robin> or KSC, that's why the GB coding standard change from
    Robin> gb2312 to gbk then to gb18030. 

It depends on what you mean  by "most".  Yes, if you include those 10s
of thousnds  of *rare* characters,  then even Unicode can  fall short.
Most Chinese text, for  instance, uses around 5000 distinct characters
only,  of  which  around  1000  accounts  for more  than  90%  of  the
characters in  a text.   Big5 is very  sufficient for normal  use.  If
not, the Chinese  people won't have thrown it away  (e.g. in favour of
Unicode).   Similarly,  Japanese  texts  employ around  3000  distinct
characters, and there  is a government standard list  of characters to
use.  Characters  outside that  list should be  theoretically avoided.
The characters in JIS are based on this set, AFAIK.


    Robin> AFAIK, most chinese characters also cannot be coded within
    Robin> mule, and exists unicode support does not solve this
    Robin> problem.

As long as 99.99% of the characters that I need for Chinese text files
can be encoded in Big5 and emacs-mule, what's the problem?


    Robin>     Of course, emacs is enough for most people in most
    Robin> time, but I am really hesitated to tell my friend once and
    Robin> once again "Sorry, but your name (羽中) is not supported by
    Robin> my emacs."

No, that's not my name.  I  think Gnus sets the charset of my postings
to big5.

And  which Emacs  is  your emacs?   Emacs  since version  20 has  been
displaying  Chinese  (I can't  speak  for  Japanese  and Korean)  very
satisfactorily.  And  I find  it, together with  Gnus, to be  the most
practical tool on Linux to read/write Chinese files/news/mails.



-- 
Lee Sau Dan                     李守敦(Big5)                    ~{@nJX6X~}(HZ) 

E-mail: danlee@informatik.uni-freiburg.de
Home page: http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~danlee