The International Macintosh Users Group presents:

Group: International Macintosh Users Group (IMUG)
(A Forum for Multilingual / Multiscript Computing)
Date: March 17, 2005, 7-9 p.m.

Speaker: Eric Muller (Adobe Systems, Inc.)

Topic: Unicode and Japanese Personal Names: Variation Sequences
to the Rescue

Location: Apple Computer, Apple Campus, 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino
Take Saratoga/Sunnyvale exit off 280, turn South to
Cupertino, turn left onto Mariani Avenue, left into
Infinite Loop.

Admission: $4, free for IMUG members

Contact: Roger Sherman, (650) 859-5981
roger [dot] sherman [at] sri [dot] com

In the character/glyph model which underlies Unicode, a character is
an abstract unit that can be displayed using any of a number of
concrete presentations. For example, an "A" can be rendered by an
upright, italic, bold or Fraktur glyph. Unicode simply does not
capture that level of detail.

The same applies to Han ideographs, and the resulting character
repertoire is generally sound and useful. However, there are some
differences in concrete representations which are important to
capture in some plain text situations, such as in people and place
names, yet are not captured by separate Unicode characters.

To accomodate those situations, Unicode intends to use variation
sequences, which are made of a character together with an indication
of the intended rendering. Furthermore, it is not possible to design
a single set of variation sequences that satisfies simultaneously the
needs of scholars, governements, publishers, etc., yet it is
desirable to reliably interchange such sequences. To support this,
Unicode intends to open a registry of ideographic variation sequences.

Eric Muller represents Adobe to the Unicode Consortium and is one of
the principal authors of "The Unicode Standard, Version 4.0."

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