CJKV Information Processing - Softcover

Lunde, Ken

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1565922247 ISBN 13: 9781565922242

Publisher: O′Reilly, 1999

Synopsis

CJKV Information Processing is the definitive guide for tackling the difficult issues faced when dealing with complex Asian languages -- Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese -- in the context of computing or Internet services.Unlike the English alphabet with a mere 26 letters, these complex writing systems use multiple alphabets comprising thousands of characters. Handling such an unwieldy amount of data is formidable and complex. Until now, working with these writing systems was an unattainable task to most, but this book clarifies the issues, even to those who don't understand East Asian languages.This new book contains revised information from Ken Lunde's first book, Understanding Japanese Information Processing, and supplements each chapter with meticulous details about how the Chinese (hanzi), Japanese (kana and kanji), Korean (hangul and hanja), and Vietnamese (Quoc ngu, chu Nom, and chu Han) writing systems have been implemented on contemporary computer systems. This book is unique in that it does not simply rattle off information that can be found in other sources, but rather it provides the reader with hitherto unexplained insights into how these complex writing systems have been adapted for use on computers, and provides the user and developer alike with useful and time-saving tips and techniques.Information on today's hot topics, such as how these writing systems impact contemporary Internet resources like the Web, HTML, XML, Java, and Adobe Acrobat, is also provided.This book is of incalculable value for the developer, programmer, user, and researcher -- anyone who comes into contact with these characters in the context of computers or the Internet needs this book. Topics covered in this book include:

• Writing systems
• Character set standards
• Encoding methods
• Input methods
• Font formats
• Typography
• Output methods
• Programming and code conversion techniques
• Dictionaries and dictionary software

This volume also contains a host of valuable appendixes, such as code conversion tables, character set tables, character set indexes, mapping tables, Perl code examples, a glossary, and a detailed bibliography.

About this title

About the Author

Ken Lunde was born in 1965 in Madison, Wisconsin, grew up in Mount Horeb, Wisconsin, and entered the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1985 as a freshman. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in linguistics in 1987. He received his Master of Arts degree in linguistics in 1988. He finally received his Doctor of Philosophy degree in linguistics in 1994, and his dissertation was entitled "Prescriptive Kanji Simplification." He joined Adobe Systems Incorporated in 1991, and is currently Project Manager, CJK Type Development.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1 - CJKV Information Processing Overview

A lot of mystique and intrigue surrounds how CJKV—Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese—text is handled on computer systems. Although I agree with there being intrigue, there is far too much mystique, in my opinion. Much of this mystery is due to a lack of information, or simply a lack of information written in a language other than Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or Vietnamese. Nevertheless, many fine folks, like you, would like to know how this all works. To confirm some of your worst fears and speculations, CJKV text does require special handling on computer systems. However, it should not be very mysterious after having read this book. You need only break the so-called one-byte-equals-one-character barrier—most CJKV characters are represented by more than a single byte (or, to put it in another way, more than eight bits).

English information processing was a reality soon after the introduction of early computer systems, which were first developed in England and the United States. Adapting software to handle more complex writing systems such as those used to represent CJKV text is a more recent phenomenon. This adaptation developed in various stages, and continues today.

There are several key issues that make CJKV text a challenge to process on computer systems:

CJKV writing systems use a mixture of different, but sometimes related, writing systems

CJKV character set standards enumerate thousands or tens of thousands of characters, which is orders of magnitude more than used in the West

There is no universally recognized or accepted CJKV character set standard such as ASCII for writing English—although Unicode can be considered a good first attempt

There is no universally recognized or accepted CJKV encoding system such as ASCII encoding—again, the various Unicode encodings can be considered an attempt at accomplishing this

There is no universally recognized or accepted input device such as the QWERTY keyboard array—although this same keyboard array, through a method of transliteration, can be used to input most CJKV text through reading or other means

CJKV text can be written horizontally or vertically, and requires special typo-graphic rules not found in Western typography, such as spanning tabs and unique line-breaking rules

You will learn that the ASCII character set standard is not as universal as most people think—different flavors of ASCII exist, as do different ASCII encoding methods. You will begin to wonder why so many developers assume that
everyone uses ASCII.

This chapter also includes several sections that explain and illustrate some very basic yet important computing concepts, such as notation and byte order, that relate to material in the remainder of this book. If you consider yourself a seasoned software engineer or expert programmer, you may still find value in those sections because they carry much more importance in the context of CJKV information processing. That is, how these concepts relate to CJKV information processing may be slightly different than what you previously learned.

Multiple Writing Systems
CJKV text is typically composed of a mixture of different writing systems. Japanese, as an example, is unique in that it uses four different writing systems. Others, such as Chinese and Korean, use less than four writing systems. Japanese is one of the few, if not the only, languages that exhibit this characteristic of so many writing systems being used together, even in the same sentence (as you will see very soon). This makes Japanese quite complex, orthographically speaking, and poses several problems. * The four Japanese writing systems are Latin characters, hiragana, katakana, and kanji (collectively referred to as "Chinese characters" regardless of the language). You are already familiar with Latin characters because the English language is written with these—this writing system consists of the upper- and lowercase Latin alphabet, which are the characters often found on typewriter keys. Hiragana and katakana are native Japanese syllabaries (see Appendix X, Glossary, for a definition of "syllabary"). Both hiragana and katakana represent the same set of 108 syllables, and are collectively known as kana. Kanji
are characters that the Japanese borrowed from China over 1,600 years ago— Chinese characters number in the thousands, and encompass meaning, reading, and shape.

About this edition

• Publisher: O′Reilly
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 1565922247
• ISBN 13: 9781565922242
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 1101