Re: [idn] Comments on protocol drafts

[Dirk-Willem van Gulik <dirkx@webweaving.org>]

RJ Atkinson wrote:
> 
> At 22:00 07-02-00 , C C Magnus Gustavsson wrote:
> >Ah. Sorry about that. I was comparing only to Mandarin.
> 
> All dialects of Chinese use the same written form,
> mentioned primarily for those without familiarity
> with Chinese.

Well, (Mr Seng, correct me if I am wrong :-) that is not
quite accurate. If you look in a typesetting manual (say
the Ikarus set from URW) you will see that Taiwanese
has some pronounciation/soundex codepoints which are
extra to unicode. Same for very formalized mandarin,
like what ones use to reprint (historic/legal) documents. 

In fact over 1.700 extra 'casts's are needed beyond unicode
by a good university printer to cover the asian main land.

So it is just like:
 
> I'll also note that ISO-8859 and UTF-8 do not support all European languages
> equally well, nor does either support other Romanised non-European languages
> (e.g. Vietnamese) equally well.

Unicode is the closest thing we have; but it is not perfect
yet.. and will propably always lag behind a bit.

Dw