Korean Language and Computers - Character Encodings

Character Encodings

In RFC 1557, a method known as ISO-2022-KR for a 7-bit encoding of Korean characters in email was described. Where 8 bits are allowed, the EUC-KR encoding is preferred. These two encodings combine US-ASCII (ISO 646) with the Korean standard KS X 1001:1992 (previously named KS C 5601:1987). In North Korea, a separate character set called KPS 9566 is in use, which is rather similar to KS X 1001.

The international Unicode standard contains special characters for representing the Korean language in the native Hangul phonetic system. There are two ways supported by Unicode. The way used by Windows is to have every one of the 11,172 syllable combinations as a code and a pre-formed font character. The other way is to encode jamos, and to let the software combine them into correct combinations, which is not supported in Windows. Of course the former way needs more font memory, but gives the possibility of getting better shapes, since it is complicated to create fully correct combinations which may be preferred when creating documents.

There is also the possibility of simply stacking a (sequence of) medial(s) (jungseong) – and then a (sequence of) final(s) (jongseong) and/or a Middle Korean pitch mark, if needed – on top of the (sequence of) initial(s) (choseong), if the font has medial and final jamos with zero-width spacing that are inserted to the left of the cursor or caret, thus appearing in the right place below or to the right of the initial. If a syllable has a horizontal medial (ㅗ, ㅛ, ㅜ, ㅠ or ㅡ), the initial will probably appear further left in a complete syllable than is the case in pre-formed syllables due to the space that must be reserved for a vertical medial, giving an aesthetically poor appearance to what may be the only way to display Middle Korean Hangul text without resorting to images, romanisation, replacement of obsolete jamo or non-standard encodings. However, most current fonts do not support this.

The Unicode standard also has attempted to create a unified CJK character set that can represent Chinese (Hanzi) as well as the Japanese (Kanji) and Korean (Hanja) derivatives of this script through the Han unification process, which does not discriminate by language nor region for rendering Chinese characters, as long as the different typographic traditions have not resulted in major differences concerning what the character looks like – see Image:Xin-jiu-zixing.png for examples of characters whose appearance recently underwent only minor changes in Mainland China. Han unification has met with some criticism.