Conceptual development of the approaches to writing systems of the five East Asian regions from the perspective of information technologyPetrovčič, Mateja (Avtor) fontEast Asian languagesCoded Character Setslegacy encoding systemsUnicodeThis paper presents a search for solutions for how to define Asian writing systems in the context of information technology. While the extension of the 7-bit ASCII to the 8-bit ASCII covered most of the alphabetic writing systems, this was far from sufficient for non-alphabetic ones. A one-dimensional way of thinking led to solutions for less than 200 characters, and that was obviously not enough for writing systems of East Asian languages. A switch to two-dimensional thinking was thus necessary. The first promising solutions were presented by Japanese scholars, and the other East Asian regions adopted their ideas with minor changes. China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Korea then became the new research centres for this issue during the following decades. This two-dimensional thinking gave birth to several new character sets and encoding methods. In Taiwan, a third dimension was even added to the previous two, creating a very systematic, complex and flexible approach to the Chinese script. The advantages of this system were never fully expressed, however, because the newly emerged Unicode became the leading system. Unicode created a new concept of unifying characters, whereby the distinction of different varieties between the scripts of the five Asian regions became a secondary question. Although Unicode has almost completely replaced the regional legacy systems, they represent an important conceptual heritage. Moreover, their multidimensional way of thinking is a prerequisite for and the basis of Unicode.20252026-01-20 15:31:55Neznano178168sl