Xref: utzoo comp.lang.postscript:4431 comp.windows.news:1991 comp.fonts:1087
Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!daemon
Newsgroups: comp.lang.postscript,comp.windows.news,comp.fonts
From: thomson@hub.toronto.edu (Brian Thomson)
Subject: Re: What order is the NeWS Kanji font in?
Message-ID: <9003091803.AA19343@beaches.hub.toronto.edu>
Keywords: kanji, ordinals
Sender: <daemon>
Organization: University of Toronto
References: <29422@amdcad.AMD.COM>
Date: 9 Mar 90 18:06:40 GMT
Lines: 51

In article <29422@amdcad.AMD.COM> cdr@amdcad.AMD.COM (Carl Rigney) writes:
>I'm playing with the kanji browser written by Stan Switzer
>(sjs@ctt.bellcore.com) and I'm wondering what order the Kanji symbols
>in the NeWS font are in.

Kanji characters are encoded as specified by Japanese standard 
JIS C 6226, which comes in 1978 and 1983 flavours that are essentially
identical.  The encoding is done such that each 16-bit character, when
regarded as a pair of 8-bit units, looks like a pair of printable
ASCII characters.  Similar standard encodings exist for Chinese and Korean.

>My question is:
>Is there any mapping from say, Nelson Index # to Ordinal value in the font?
>For example, Ko (self) is 1462 in Nelson, and 370 in Hadamitzky & Spahn.
>You can display it with
>
>/Kanji findfont 24 scalefont setfont
>72 72 moveto
>(\270\312) show
>
>96*(188-160) + (202-160) is 2730.  What I'm wondering is, is there any
>mapping, or are the Kanji in the font in random order (that would be horrible!).
>

The high-order (i.e. 128) bit being on is not required by the standard,
it is a convention often used to distinguish Kanji from Roman characters
in text that may contain both.  The standard way to do this is to use
escape sequences to switch from one character set to the other and back
again.  These escape sequences are standardized by the ISO.

I have heard of Kanji dictionaries that indicate the JIS code, but I
don't know any specifics.

The character set actually contains more than just Kanji.  It begins
with kana (Japanese phonetic alphabets), graphics symbols, and
Roman, Greek, and Cyrillic alphabets, and Arabic numerals.
Then come the Kanji, which are in two groups: first a group of
(relatively) common characters ordered by their commonest
"on" (Chinese-derived) pronunciation in the usual Japanese syllabary order
(a-i-u-e-o-ka/ga-ki/gi- etc.), then a group of less common ones ordered
by radical.

The character you describe has the pronunciations "onore", "ki", "ko",
and sometimes "mi" in people's names.  It is a common character, and
its position in the character set is determined by the "ko" reading.
That puts it near the front of the pack.  It is immediately followed
by (\270\313 as you would put it) "ko" meaning a kind of storage shed,
as in "reizouko" = refrigerator.
-- 
		    Brian Thomson,	    CSRI Univ. of Toronto
		    utcsri!uthub!thomson, thomson@hub.toronto.edu