CJKV Information Processing, 2nd Edition

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Chapter 1: CJKV Information Processing Overview

ere is no universally recognized or accepted CJKV encoding method such as ASCII •

encoding—again, the various Unicode encoding forms have become the most widely

used encodings, for OSes, applications, and for web pages.

ere is no universally recognized or accepted input device such as the • QWERTY

keyboard array—this same keyboard array, through a method of transliteration, is

frequently used to input most CJKV text through reading or other means.

CJKV text can be written horizontally or vertically, and requires special typograph-•

ic rules not found in Western typography, such as spanning tabs and unique line-

breaking rules.

Learning that the ASCII character set standard is not as universal as most people think

is an important step. You may begin to wonder why so many developers assume that

everyone uses ASCII. is is okay. For some regions, ASCII is sucient. Still, ASCII has

its virtues. It is relatively stable, and it forms the foundation for many character sets and

encodings. UTF-8 encoding, which is the most common encoding form used for today’s

web pages, uses ASCII as a subset. In fact, it is this characteristic that makes its use pre-

ferred over the other two Unicode encoding forms, specically UTF-16 and UTF-32.

Over the course of reading this chapter, you will encounter several sections that explain

and illustra ...