|
Little more than ten years ago, the IBM personal computer (FMC) could not display graphics; the quality of dot-matrix printers was poor; and daisy- wheel printers could not print non-Latin characters. The ability to write on a computer in Western European languages-with their special letters and accents-is a recent phenomenon. Today, improved computer technology provides a fertile environment in which European, Middle-Eastern, and Asian language software has blossomed. In a few years, all the world's living languages will be readily available on computers.
Chinese, being a "pictorial" language, was one of the most difficult for which to create computer programs. At first, what little was developed was done by Chinese engineers in Taiwan and the People's Republic of China, and what they produced frequently was unintelligible to anyone but engineers! Likewise, Japanese, Korean, and other Asian programmers developed systems only they could use. As did their American counterparts, they assumed foreigners would have no need of their products.
The first and the best professional multilingual program that included Asian languages was the Xerox Star Viewpoint. But this, and the 5550-PC systems by IBM, were sold almost exclusively to large companies in Asia; they were not intended for personal use, for small companies, or for non-Asians. When the Apple LISA (modeled on the successful Xerox Star) appeared, it showed great potential. With its graphics base, it could, in principle, adapt to any language or character set. But it failed the marketing test.
Its successor, the Macintosh computer, offered even better graphics and was ideally suited for multilingual computing. Building on this strength, Apple provided an operating system for each Asian language and for many other languages, but could make no multilingual international system.
In part, this lack of international multilingual support was due to problems in staffing: support all languages, a company would have to offer international technical support lines or hire polyglot linguists in every country. Neither was financially realistic; the market for multilingual computing products was still quite small. This is no longer true! The market is now international, and companies that do not think in global, multi- ethnic, and multilingual terms are losing their competitive edge.
Using multilingual products is still an expensive and complex proposition, but the benefits outweigh the costs in the multilingual market. Producing multilingual products is much more expensive than using them. The complexities presented by non-standard standards and nationalistic corporations have hindered developers from producing standardized international tools that preserve varied national qualities. However, with the introduction of Unicode, the new international character-coding standard- multilingual support will be simpler.
Unicode
Unicodc was invented by a group of internationally minded engineers who had grown frustrated with the limitations imposed by incompatible computer standards: ASCII for American English, JIS for Japanese, GB- Code for Chinese in the Peoples' Republic of China, Big-5 for Chinese in Taiwan, KS-code for Korean, ISCII for India languages, and others.
Unicode is a 16 bit code (which provides two to the sixteenth power, or more than 65,000, code points for coding characters) hat, for all practical purposes, provides adequate coding for electronic communications in all the living languages of the world. As long as the essential characters of every language so carefully distinguished from the various typefaces in which they are displayed or printed, dead languages can be encoded as well.
The characters of any language take on different and uses in different dialects and cultures, and those must be preserved for effective communication. But essential meaning and function of each character must also maintained by assigning a unique character code. A program thus can break apart the various aspects of character so that sorting;, search and replace, and functions can occur efficiently. The ability to present variations also is preserved. This allows each culture subculture to define the letters and characters of its and to assign attributes to the basic characters defined characters code. In sum, an international standard must define characters from an international perspective, without preventing any culture from defining its own character sets for internal communications. This is the role of Unicode.
The International Standards Organization (ISO) incorporated Unicode into the newest International Standard (10026, vers. 1.2) for multilingual computing. Although there will always be a need to improve any standard, 10646, ver. 1.2 is now virtually guaranteed to become a real international standard-both in form and in practice.
China (PRC), Japan, Korea and Taiwan, in their standards organizations, have agreed to a common code for all the East Asian languages. In sorting out differences among Japanese Kanji, Korean Hanja, and Chinese Hanzi, experts have agreed that most of them are the same; only the typefaces differ. The characters that were actually invented in Korea or Japan have been given unique character codes in Unicode and ISO 10646, ver. 1.2. Other languages, such as Mongolian and Tibetan, have not been fully standardized anywhere, so the Unicode and ISO standards for these languages are still being developed.
As a service, the Unicode Consortium is making public the code and the matching tables for conversion between Unicode and other character-code standards. The charts and tables illustrations the character codes for most languages are in Unicode manuals. The Addison Wesley Publishing Company, Inc., has published the non-Han portion of the unicode manual; it's called The Unicode Standard; Worldwide Character Encoding, Version 1.0, Volume I. The same company will soon publish volume two, which will include the Chinese-Japanese-Korean unified set of characters. The consortium also offers seminars about the standardized coding system to interested groups.
Unicode member companies are in the process of creating application programs using the new code. Items intended for production in 1993 are a Unicode version of the Macintosh "system," Unicode-compatible versions of MS DOS and Windows, a Unicode-compatible Novell Netware product, international networking and telecommunications protocols using Unicode, and a number of "foreign" language fonts keyed to the Unicode character sets. As these products come on the market.
For further information, please send e-mail to :comstar@gy.com