You realize, this dates back to 1997?I'm not an expert but I believe this is a font, not an encoding scheme.

Yeah, but I just found out about it today, and they haven't renounced it yet, so... good point, though, it is indeed a font.

さすが東大！

やはり、日本文化における漢字の重要性を考えると日本独特なコードシステムが必要と思います。うむ、賛成、賛成！

東大明朝万歳！東大明朝万歳！とぅダっギョッ！

Sorry, Matt! I stepped out for a sec without locking the door and one of our (less stable) students (definite uyoku leanings) slipped in and tried posting in my name. Have to keep an eye on her from now on....

Mark: I think maybe "dates back" might be the wrong way of looking at it; I mean, look who we're talking about: in those hallowed halls eight years is probably nothing! ("A thousand years is in Thy sight but...")

True they're on about fonts, but they mention Unicode being insufficient, which makes me think they've got ideas about encodings as well.

ibadairon,Unfortunately, the ideas about encoding are even older than Unicode. Look no farther than another U of Tokyo project, Dr. Sakamura and his TRON system. Although TRON is now the world's most popular embedded OS (hence the world's most popular OS, period), BTRON, the desktop version that featured the full encoding system, never took off (yes, I know, there was some dirty politics, but I don't think that was really the main reason). And meanwhile, Unicode's gone through several revisions that have basically (not completely) taken care of the original complaints from the 1980s.I happen to think that the assignment of language characteristics is best achieved by other means than embedding them into the encoding system.

Although fonts are big business in Japan (check out Morisawa's offerings), there is no business case to be made for a high-end, high-quality font that contains all these little-used characters (which can be easily custom-added as needed). So all the "full" fonts tend to look ugly because they're done on the cheap, by volunteers or academics.