The creator of the Tron computer operating system said Wednesday he has developed technology to show nonstandard kanji characters on Western operating systems such as Windows and Macintosh.
"The new technology can drastically save energy," University of Tokyo Professor Ken Sakamura said. "A big company will be able to cut costs by several hundred million yen a year."
To handle nonstandard characters with Western alphabet-based operating systems, operators need to manually make a list of such characters or edit them individually.
The new technology uses a database of so-called Tron codes that assign an identification number to each nonstandard character. Using a special server, the operator can retrieve such characters.
Sakamura said he will open the database and server free of charge.
Nonstandard kanji characters are often found in the names of people and places as well as literary works.