🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <MELBY.93Jan6113951@dove.yk.fujitsu.co.jp>,
melby@dove.yk.fujitsu.co.jp (John B. Melby) wrote:
> 
> If what I have heard about the Unicode standard is accurate, Chinese
> simplified forms are not distinguished from Chinese unsimplified forms
> when they are effectively equivalent. [...]

I'm not sure what you mean by "effectively equivalent."  If you mean
"they look pretty much the same," this is true -- in which case the
character isn't "simplified" (as the word is used in Taiwan).  The
simplified and traditional forms for Chinese characters are unified if
and only if their glyphs have virtually the same appearance (formally,
the unification rules developed by the CJK-JRG are used), and they do
not both occur in the same national character set standard.  If you
believe mean something else, I believe the statement is wrong.  

In practice, virtually all the simplified forms of Chinese characters
used by mainland China are separated from their traditional/unsimplified
counterparts.  You cannot change simplified Chinese to traditional by
changing fonts, or vice versa, and any font vendor who uses a simplified
Chinese glyph for an unsimplified form would be doing a Very Bad Thing
-- not, of course, that this will stop them.  :-(

> Of course, there is one major flaw in the preliminary Unicode version:
 the
> Japanese simplified form of "sakura" (ying1hua1 de ying1) is not
included.

It is U+685C.  (Unless we misunderstand your meaning here.)  I should
point out also that Unicode is a superset of both JIS 0208 and JIS 0212
(and always has been), so if this were a design flaw in Unicode, it
would also be a design flaw of both JIS sets.  

----
John H. Jenkins
John_Jenkins@taligent.com