CJKV Information Processing, 2nd Edition

567

CHAPTER 9

Information Processing Techniques

Remember what you have learned in earlier chapters, specically that CJKV character set

standards and encoding methods have many characteristics that make each one unique

and distinct. But within a given locale, there is comfort in knowing that at least some

eort was made to keep its various encoding methods somewhat compatible. More im-

portantly, the various encodings for Unicode are entirely and completely compatible. In

addition, compatibility with Unicode has perhaps become even more critical, given its

widespread use in today’s OSes and application. What we are discussing, of course, is the

issue of interoperability.

Understanding that interoperability issues have become increasingly important—even

critical—when one is dealing with CJKV information processing on multiple platforms is

a prudent mind set to maintain. Not all computer systems use the same encoding method.

Using Japanese as an historic example, Shi-JIS encoding was typically used on Windows-

and Mac OS–based machines, EUC-JP encoding was used on Unix-based machines, and

ISO-2022-JP encoding was used for electronic transmission, such as email and news. Even

with Unicode, there are three basic encodings, and the possibility of needing to deal with

all three of them, in addition to interoperating with legacy encoding, is relatively high.

Because I was faced with ...