CJKV Information Processing, 2nd Edition

Character Set Standard Oddities

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Character Set Standard Oddities

While the contents of character set standards are, for the most part, assumed

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to be

error-free by soware developers and users, many of them do exhibit some interesting

characteristics that can only be described as oddities. For example, some character set

standards contain duplicate characters, some include characters that do not or should

not exist (although one could argue that such characters now exist by virtue of being in

a character set standard), some do not contain some characters that should have been

included (because they are needed to complete character pairs, to form a known word,

or to provide the corresponding traditional form of a simplied character), and some

became endowed with ctitious extensions. e following sections detail these oddities

and draw examples from common character set standards.

Duplicate Characters

e most common character set oddity is duplicate characters. In some cases, duplicate

characters are intentional. Take, for instance, the hanja in KS X 1001:2004 that are or-

dered according to their readings. For those hanja that have been classied with multiple

readings, multiple instances of the hanja have been encoded in that standard. For reasons

of compatibility, Unicode needs to propagate these duplicate characters, which it does

through the use of i ...