An Introduction to Writing Systems and Unicode (r12a.github.io)

35 points by mariuz 3 days ago

7 comments:

by ks2048 3 hours ago

This site has been a gem for a long time for Unicode and language-related topics. Just as good to link to the top-level,

https://r12a.github.io/

by mostafah 2 hours ago

Richard is amazing. I briefly worked with him while volunteering on a W3C text layout requirements document. He cares deeply about writing systems, and he has been doing so much valuable work in this space.

by vishnuharidas 25 minutes ago

Also: UTF-8 Playground: https://utf8-playground.netlify.app

by ovciokko 2 hours ago

The texts in the images claimed to be Simplified Chinese are not really conforming the standard glyph shapes of hanzi as defined by the government of China; they look more like the Japanese standard shapes of kanji.

by mbrubeck 2 hours ago

Can you clarify which characters you're talking about? I don't see any examples of Japanese-specific kanji in the simplified Chinese examples.

For example, the first image uses 沟 and 时 forms that are found only in simplified Chinese. In both Japanese and traditional Chinese, these are written 溝 and 時.

The images also correctly use the Chinese forms of 統/统. The Japanese form [0] differs from both and does not appear in these images.

请 as shown in the image is similarly used only in simplified Chinese, not Japanese. In Japanese, the traditional Chinese form is normally used in handwriting, and an alternate form of the 訁 radical (different from either of the Chinese forms) is often used in printed text.

[0]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%B5%B1#Japanese

by dhosek 2 hours ago

One of the big complaints about Han-unification in Unicode is that simplified and traditional forms share the same code points so display of simplified vs traditional is up to the font to manage.

by renhanxue 12 minutes ago

That's not really accurate. An overwhelming majority of the simplified characters have had their own code points in Unicode ever since 1.0. Some more details here: https://r12a.github.io/scripts/chinese/

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