Re: ASCII and JIS X 0201 Roman - the backslash problem

On Fri, May 10, 2002 at 08:03:08PM +0100, Markus Kuhn wrote:
> The only long-term solution out of this mess is pure Unicode. Use proper
> Unicode fonts where U+00A5 is a (single-width) YEN and U+005C is a
> backslash, and (you normally should never need it) U+FFE5 is the
> FULLWIDTH YEN SIGN.

An ideal long-term solution is of no use if it's impossible to get
people to use it.  Microsoft refuses to fix their buggy fonts, so it's
unlikely this solution can ever be used widespread.

> Forget about the Shift_JIS and EUC_JP tradition and start to think in a
> context, where character semantics is completely and exclusively defined
> by Unicode. You will loose a few double-width characters (such as
> doublewidth Cyrillic and double-width block graphics), and you will
> discover that it is perfectly possible to write nice Japanese plaintext
> files nicely without any of these. For old files, people will surely

Aren't there enough obstacles to getting Unicode accepted in some places
without having to convince them they don't really need something they've
been using for years?  It doesn't really matter if it's true or not; it
seems there's enough battles to be fought already.

Out of curiosity, Tomohiro, is full-width Yen commonly used?  (I'd guess 円
would be a more obvious choice for full-width.)

-- 
Glenn Maynard