Re: Level of Unicode support required for various languages

On Oct 25, 2007, at 9:10 AM, Peter Constable wrote:

> From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]]  
> On Behalf Of [email protected]
>
>> You certianly support for plane 2 characters, some really obsurce
>> Chinese characters are in the BMP, but some very useful ones are in
>> plane 2.
>
> I wonder if you could elaborate. We hear that CJK users typically  
> use well under 10K characters, and for years there have been  
> implementations using character sets that didn't include any of the  
> Plane 2 characters and that, evidently, were adequate for lots of  
> usage. So, it's not obvious that Plane 2 characters would be needed  
> in all application scenarios. (Of course, Tim hasn't really said  
> much about his application scenario.) I do note that the II Core set  
> includes 22 Plane 2 characters; are these the characters you had in  
> mind? In what scenarios is it important to support them?
>


Prior to the development of HK SCS, the effort in standardizing  
Chinese on computers was directed towards Standard Written Chinese as  
well as additional needs specific to Taiwan and the PRC.  HK SCS is  
the first concerted effort to determine what additional characters are  
needed in Hong Kong (e.g., for place names).  Prior to HK SCS, users  
in Hong Kong had to resort to various hacks to solve this same  
problem.  Because HK SCS was developed relatively late in the process,  
some of the characters required for relatively common use in Hong Kong  
ended up in Plane 2.

=====
John H. Jenkins
[email protected]