CJKV Information Processing, 2nd Edition

International Character Set Standards

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175

If you look carefully at the glyphs in Table 3-99, there are clear cases of locale-specic

dierences that would persist regardless of typeface design, such as  versus . e

top element appears to be simply mirrored, but the former glyph is considered to be one

stroke less, thus simplied.

Unicode versus vendor character sets

Prior to Unicode eectively becoming the default or de facto way in which text is handled

in modern OSes and applications, vendor character sets were quite common. A vendor

character set is typically built on top of a national character set. For example, there are

at least a dozen vendor character sets that have been built on top of Japan’s JIS X 0208

character set standard. What made vendor character sets problematic is that they oen

conicted with one another.

Interestingly, and for the greater good, Unicode has all but made the need for vendor

character sets go away. e fact that characters are added to Unicode on a somewhat regu-

lar basis, thanks to the process that is in place to do so, means that vendors who would

otherwise resort to dening their own character set extensions can now nd the necessary

characters somewhere within Unicode. If they cannot nd the characters that they need,

they can take the necessary steps to propose them as new characters.

GB 13000.1-93

e Chinese translation of ISO 10646-1:1993 ...