alt.hn

3/29/2026 at 5:43:52 PM

An Introduction to Writing Systems and Unicode

 https://r12a.github.io/scripts/tutorial/part2

by mariuz

4/1/2026 at 6:09:26 PM

This site has been a gem for a long time for Unicode and language-related topics. Just as good to link to the top-level,

https://r12a.github.io/

by ks2048

4/1/2026 at 6:34:43 PM

Richard is amazing. I briefly worked with him while volunteering on a W3C text layout requirements document. He cares deeply about writing systems, and he has been doing so much valuable work in this space.

by mostafah

4/1/2026 at 9:51:13 PM

Are there any developments towards font file standards that support the theoretical full space of unicode? I've always heard that fonts are limited in size to a subset of the true space.

by siruwastaken

4/1/2026 at 10:00:16 PM

It's not a big problem in practice since you can split large character sets across multiple files and use multi-font support to combine them in the renderer.

by yorwba

4/1/2026 at 6:20:40 PM

The texts in the images claimed to be Simplified Chinese are not really conforming the standard glyph shapes of hanzi as defined by the government of China; they look more like the Japanese standard shapes of kanji.

by ovciokko

4/1/2026 at 7:08:09 PM

Can you clarify which characters you're talking about? I don't see any examples of Japanese-specific kanji in the simplified Chinese examples.

For example, the first image uses 沟 and 时 forms that are found only in simplified Chinese. In both Japanese and traditional Chinese, these are written 溝 and 時.

The images also correctly use the Chinese forms of 統/统. The Japanese form [0] differs from both and does not appear in these images.

请 as shown in the image is similarly used only in simplified Chinese, not Japanese. In Japanese, the traditional Chinese form is normally used in handwriting, and an alternate form of the 訁 radical (different from either of the Chinese forms) is often used in printed text.

[0]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%B5%B1#Japanese

by mbrubeck

4/1/2026 at 10:46:16 PM

Thanks for your reply. I was wrong in that they are using the Japanese glyphs. The ones I've noticed are 次将及化等; I checked again and 次及化等 are actually Traditional Chinese glyphs, while 将 is Japanese glyph. It seems that these glyphs are a mix of multiple standards.

by ovciokko

4/2/2026 at 1:18:14 AM

Thanks, I missed that 将 was shinjitai. I wonder what caused the weird mixture of glyphs in that example image.

by mbrubeck

4/1/2026 at 6:58:48 PM

One of the big complaints about Han-unification in Unicode is that simplified and traditional forms share the same code points so display of simplified vs traditional is up to the font to manage.

by dhosek

4/1/2026 at 8:30:18 PM

That's not really accurate. An overwhelming majority of the simplified characters have had their own code points in Unicode ever since 1.0. Some more details here: https://r12a.github.io/scripts/chinese/

by renhanxue

4/1/2026 at 9:36:42 PM

That’s good to know. I’ve heard the complaint offered many times, but don’t have the necessary language skills to know otherwise.

by dhosek

4/2/2026 at 7:23:56 AM

W site

by grimm8000