Use and Future

Thus it will become easier to have applications which are multi language aware within these environments. But it will still not be easy.

It is still necessary to write the application to recognise and manipulate the multiple character sets that are now available. The problems listed above still remain.

As an example of the effort required, only one major library system vendor is able to support UNICODE encoding and two have announced support for it. IME has been developing its MuCh (Multiple Character sets) support for two years and has a small number of systems in the field.

The following problems are not solved by UNICODE (or any other encoding standard):

UNICODE solves the problem unambiguous encoding of the worlds characters ...

• Local characters
  Scripts such as Chinese and Korean allow the user to invent new characters (equivalent to words in a western language dictionary) for local conditions and as the world advances.
• Missing languages
  If the script for the language you want is not included then UNICODE is no use unless you use the private use pages.

Unicode is a universal encoding scheme ... Data in local systems must be converted from and to and this is a lengthy process, both in setting up the tables and in running the conversion.

Display & Printing...

Many popular operating systems (MS-DOS, WINDOWS 3.1, etc.) don't recognise UNICODE and so special conversions have to be undertaken or special programming to handle the display and printing of the stored characters.

Input ...

UNICODE is no help at all for input. In a way it makes matters worse as users expect to be able to easily use all the available characters on a "UNICODE" system, but this is not possible without training (e.g. Chinese still need on of the special input editors).

Sorting ...

UNICODE does not address this at all - as it should not. It is part of the localisation issue and sort tables have to be created and used by the users and software. This depends on language and culture as well as character sets.

Localisation ...

UNICODE transmits only the content of plain text; for a meaningful document there must also be formatting information (SGML, RTF, etc.), and content designation (MARC, etc.) before the receiving system can be expected to make sense of the whole document.

The sense that the local system makes of the document is mostly dependent on the local software and hardware capabilities and not the encoding scheme.