Not so KS, if you know what I mean....

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2011/12/05 07:01 -05:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2011/12/05/10244123.aspx


A few months ago, Ken Lunde of Adobe noted some mapping differences between several different vendors and the Korean KS X 1001 standard:

The small table below shows the fourteen KS X 1001 code points that map differently,
depending on the platform:

  KS X 1001 (GR)  Unicode (W = Windows; M = Macintosh; A = Adobe)
  01-09 (0xA1A9)  U+00AD (W) U+2013 (M/A) *
  01-10 (0xA1AA)  U+2014 (M/A) U+2015 (W) *
  01-11 (0xA1AB)  U+2016 (M/A) U+2225 (W) *
  01-13 (0xA1AD)  U+223C (W) U+301C (M) U+FF5E (A) *
  01-43 (0xA1CB)  U+00A2 (M) U+FFE0 (W/A) *
  01-44 (0xA1CC)  U+00A3 (M) U+FFE1 (W/A) *
  01-45 (0xA1CD)  U+00A5 (M) U+FFE5 (W/A) *
  01-76 (0xA1EC)  U+00AB (A) U+226A (W/M)
  01-77 (0xA1ED)  U+00BB (A) U+226B (W/M)
  01-94 (0xA1FE)  U+00AC (M) U+FFE2 (W/A) *
  02-06 (0xA2A6)  U+02DC (M/A) U+FF5E (W) *
  02-16 (0xA2B0)  U+02D0 (W/M) U+2236 (A)
  02-33 (0xA2C1)  U+2299 (W) U+25C9 (M/A) *
  03-94 (0xA3FE)  U+203E (M) U+FFE3 (W/A) *

As it turns out, the plan for the government is to do an official mapping between Unicode and their standard.

This would of course lead to small problems of these different vendors due to the aforementioned small differences....

The question I was asked was whether or not we would be updating Windows code page 949 after the standard was updated.

Ah.

The short answer?

No.

The slightly longer answer?

Hell no! What, are you kidding me?

Our own stability requirements keep us from changing our code pages.

And people who have to move between platforms should generally convert to Unicode using each platform's individual notion of how to map to and from Unicode.

Then you can use Unicode as the invariant info that can be moved to different platforms....


Brian Tkatch on 5 Dec 2011 8:22 AM:

Before i realized "invarint" was a typo, i thought it was a data type. :)

Ken Lunde on 9 Dec 2011 5:47 AM:

I thought that the platform-specific differences were somewhat nasty for Japanese, specifically referring to the Unicode mappings of some symbols in JIS X 0208, but I discovered that it is nastier for Korean.


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