No Unicode!

["N. Sivin" nsivin@xxxxxxxx]

K. Frank mentioned an unfinished Chinese editor that I tried out in beta
roughly 3 years ago. It definitely is not Unicode.

Unicode has been the world standard for coding for several years now. The
*only* PC operating system that supports it is Windows NT; even Macintosh
does not. At one point Apple, a member of the original Unicode consortium,
said they planned to (which would have moved me to Macintosh), but changed
their minds. And there is no word processing *software* that supports it,
so far as I know, for NT! TwinBridge, the widely used Chinese input
program, offers a choice of one coding standard "compatible with" Unicode,
but that doesn't mean beans until the latter is available to the average
user. I have not seen any reason to bother with it.

Cheers,

-------
N. Sivin
History and Sociology of Science
University of Pennsylvania
nsivin@xxxxxxxx