> A friend who is familiar with East Asia And Its Issues tells me that
> Taiwan uses the same characters as mainland China, except that the
> mainland did a simplification of the written forms a few years back.
This is what Unicode solves by the Han unification. The Japanese,
mainland China and Taiwanese ideograohs are unified.
But not all ideographs are really in use everywhere and those which
are standardized so far are the ones which are in frequent use and
therefore are necessary. Those ideographs which will be standardized
in future are mostly found in old documents. The Taiwanese have
special interest in these since they have the money to digitalize the
old libraries.
> I assume that bringing in the Taiwainese characters will introduce a
> few new characters, due to linguistic divergence over time, but it
> shouldn't be that many. There are more than ten thousand unassigned
> character positions left in Unicode.
No, the Taiwanese characters are already in. But there will be many
more which have to be added.
Beside this there are many more languages which wait to be supported
and probably they will also need more room than is available in the
first page.
> When can we expect a verdict on this from the Unicode consortium?
I don't know. Internals like this are not discussed in the channels I
follow.
-- Uli
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