Understanding Japanese Information Processing

by Ken Lunde, Peter Mui (Editor), Tim Reilly (Editor)

There are many complex issues surrounding the use of the Japanese language in computing. Unlike English, which has 26 letters in a single alphabet, Japanese has thousands of characters in three scripts. The issues around handling such an unwieldy collection of data are formidable and complex. Up to now, researching and understanding the relevant issues has been a difficult, if not unattainable task, especially to a person who doesn't read or speak Japanese.

Understanding Japanese Information Processing is a book that provides detailed information on all aspects of handling Japanese text on computer systems. It brings all of the relevant information together in a single book. It covers everything from the origins of modern-day Japanese to the latest information on specific emerging computer encoding standards.

Topics covered in this book include:


The Japanese writing system Japanese character set standards Japanese encoding methods Japanese input and output Japanese code conversion techniques Japanese code and text processing tools In addition, there are fifteen appendices which provide additional reference material, such as a code conversion table, character set tables, mapping tables, an extensive list of software sources, a glossary, and more.

Genres: Reference, Computer Science, Programming, Japan, Technical, Japanese Literature

470 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1993

Reviews

[Michael Finocchiaro · Rating 4 out of 5]

Probably quite dated now, at the time when I was working on UNIX trying to help customers in Japan and China, this was THE book to understand how encoding of Kanji and Chinese works and how to debug issues. Actually, it was the only book of its kind as far as I know.