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doconnor@titania.srg.UUCP (Dennis O'Connor x4982 room 6-230N) writes:


>With respect to Japanese character sets :

>There are four character sets used in Japan :

>	Kanji : 2000+ common characters, plus more uncommon ones. Most adults
>	can read and write Kanji. Every "character" stands for a complete
>	word or concept.

>	Hiragana (sp?) : about 150 characters, I think. Used to phonetically
>	spell out words that are native to the Japanese language.

>	Katakana : again, about 150 characters. Used to phonetically spell
>	out words that have been imported into Japanese from foriegn languages.

The character sets I have seen has 86 katakana and 83 hiragana characters.
But then I am talking about "encoded character sets" like 8859-1 etc,
not the "character set repertoire" which is an abstract kind of guy.

There are to my knowledge several encoded character sets in usage in Japan today, including:

    X0201: an 8 bit character set including almost all of ASCII
           (except backslash which is a Yen sign) and the katakana
           characters.
    X0208: a 16 (14) bit character set consisting of matematical
           characters, latin, hiragana, katakana, cyrillic and greek
           and some box drawing characters, then the large section
           of kanji characters which are ordered in two parts,
           the more common ones in pronounciation order (Japanese 
           order!) and then the less frequent ones in radical/stroke
           order. Some 6500 kanji characters are included.

    X0212: A new 16 (14) bit character set with a lot of the latin, 
           cyrillic, greek and kanji characters not in X0208.

    X0201, X0208 and X0212 are published by JIS - the Japanese
    standards institute, but it seems like the 16 bit sets are
    not widely implemented, maybe because that demands a quite big 
    character set.

    Shift-JIS: 8/16 bits character set which is used on PCs.
           Normal ASCII characters are just in 8 bits, and some 
           katakana characters are also in just 8 bits. Then some
           of the characters are used as escape sequences to provide
           about 3000 kanji characters.

    EUC:   Enhanced UNIX Code: This is the above character sets
           and others encoded with ISO 2022 techniques.
           So it is possible to shift in and out between several
           character sets.

Keld Simonsen