On Fri, 7 Mar 2003 15:37:56 -0500, Poor, Edmund W Edmund.W.Poor@abc.com wrote:
What's wrong with Asian characters?
The fact that not everybody can view them? Although unicode support is increasing steadily, not everyone wants to support multi-megabyte fonts on their machine. (and in fact you are required to own a valid MS-Office or MS publisher license to obtain many of them). I once installed Arial Unicode MS on an old, slow machine, and it had a visible impact on system performance. Or in the case of IE users, not everyone wants to download and install vast OS patches to add "support". Perhaps I should create a sig using Cherokee or Ethiopic glyphs. AFAIK, only Mozilla and Opera users with code2000 or code2001 fonts installed will be able to see them.
There is also the point that even if you can view them, occidental users do not have the culturally-induced brain patterings to quickly distinguish between CJK ideographs. So once there are a dozen or so users signing with them it becomes rather difficult for many people to identify them.
Lastly - I can quickly type user:dramatic in a searchbox or URL, but unless I have an IME installed, about the only means I have of entering a CJK character is to locate it amongst a couple of thousand others in unibook (how many people have that installed?) or the NT/2k/XP version of charmap.