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Comment by catblast01 | Hacker News Reader

> (A harder problem is Japanese — Japan really got screwed over with Han unification, so choosing Shift-JIS over any Unicode encoding is often best.)

This statement needs more support. I think “screwed over” is a bit harsh, since I’m not aware the impact on Japanese was anymore than the rest of CJK. Despite the Han unification controversy, Unicode has been heavily adopted in Japan. The space requirements are basically the same as all CJK. Half-width kana is heavier since they are one byte in shift jis but they’re relatively uncommon.

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As far as I'm aware one problem is displaying text. Japanese readers generally need a Japanese font to correctly display Japanese text if it's Unicode. This becomes a problem when you potentially have text that can come from different languages. E.g. a Japanese font will display Chinese incorrectly.

On the web you can work around this using the lang attribute to tell the browser how text should be interpreted.

It's notable that, for example, traditional and simplified Chinese does not have this problem because they are encoded separately.

Another problem is missing characters. Some people have complained of not being able to write their own name. I'm not sure to what extent this has been solved through Unicode updates.

I have been learning Japanese for about a year now, so I don't have that much experience reading Japanese text yet [1]. I'm aware of some of the visual differences between Chinese and Japanese fonts, but I have not yet had trouble reading Japanese text set in a Chinese font. If you have any specific examples for Kanji that are difficult to recognize in a Chinese font, I'd be interested.

[1] Although on the other hand you could argue that I'm spending more conscious effort reading Japanese text than a native speaker would.

Sorry, I can't speak confidently on this because I can't read Japanese (or Chinese or Korean). I can only report what I've been told by users.

Including language metadata with text was felt to be especially important for Japanese and Korean users. I was told the difference was like having "595 kg" displayed as "5P5 kg". That is, it's possible to decipher the intended meaning but it looks wrong and it takes a moment to work out what was meant. Depending on the language some glyphs can be mirror images, have extra strokes, strokes missing or in different places or at different angles.

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