Big5 vs. UTF-8 for Chinese ?

[Ernst K. Locker]

I am fairly new to internationalization and could need some help from
experienced programmers for a design decision:

Our application is using double-byte Unicode to work with and display Chinese
characters internally.

But externally this data has to be stored in an ASCII-compatible way in order
to work with existing, non unicode-aware applications such as the database
being used.

So I was looking into using the UTF-8 encoding for external data storage.

Unfortunately it seems like that our client is using a version of Quark XPress
which can only handle the Big5 encoding for Chinese, not UTF-8.

So in order to avoid a second conversion from UTF-8 to Big5 I am now
considering to use Big5 as the external encoding for Chinese text.

Are there any major drawbacks to using Big5 other than I would be restricted
to Chinese?


Thanks for any input, Ernie.

[Michael (michka) Kaplan [MS]]

Post by Ernst K. Locker
Are there any major drawbacks to using Big5 other than I would
be restricted to Chinese?

There is also the fact that you would be restricted in which Chinese you
could use (missing 40,000+ ideographs from the latest version of CNS-11643,
for example.