RESOURCE> SAT Taisho Database Project adds 2,800+ characters to Unicode

A. Charles Muller Discussion

[Posted on behalf of Masahiro Shimoda]

Dear Colleagues,

It is the great pleasure of the members of the SAT project to announce that our team has succeeded in getting a proposal through Unicode in which more than 2,800 characters from the Taishō canon that were not yet contained in the present international standard character set, are now being added. This means that these characters, which had previously been rendered in the various digital canons as normalized variants, GIF images, etc., will now be representable by standard computer font display. These characters will be made available in the release of Unicode 10.0. We hope best advantage will be taken of this by all people who are interested in East Asian Buddhism and cultures.

In addition to the boon for Buddhist studies research, there is special significance contained in this event, as it marks the first time that the Ideographic Rapporteur Group (IRG) that is, the technical committee under the auspices of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has accepted and processed a proposal from an academic body, having in the past only accepted materials from government bodies of various countries. Thus, a way has been paved for such an approach in the future. We would like to extend our deep gratitude to those scholars of Buddhist Studies and Digital Humanities who affixed their signatures to the written petition submitted to IRG in 2012. This provided a distinct impetus toward the achievement of this goal.

Details of this are provided in Japanese at http://21dzk.l.u-tokyo.ac.jp/SAT/ucs_encoded.pdf

Best wishes,

Masahiro Shimoda

University of Tokyo

1 Reply

Post Reply

This is fantastic news -- an excellent step forward for the field! Congratulations to all involved!

Paul Hackett
Columbia University