[tex-live] merging texmf-doc into texmf-dist

[Arthur Reutenauer]

  Maybe it's best to hear the opinion of the Chinese contributors to
this list, but here's mine:

> do people in Taiwan understand simplyfied Chinese and do people in the
> Peoples Republic understand traditional Chinese?

  Mostly, no.  Simplified characters are official in the People's
Republic of China and are very common abroad, but they are rarely to be
found in Taiwan.  Vice-versa for traditional characters.

  People who have never been confronted with one set of characters are
unlikely to understand them well.  I'd say this is more the case for
people who have been educated in traditional characters (mostly to be
found in Taiwan, but also abroad); on the contrary, people who have
learned simplified characters will know a bit about the corresponding
traditional forms.  But they won't be fluent in reading it, in most
cases.

> How significant are the differences?

  The written differences are huge (while, again, the spoken languages
are basically the same).  A significant proportion of the characters are
different (I'd hate to give a number lightly, but let's say around half
of them).  And they're often drastically different in shape.  It is a
completely different order of magnitude than the recent spelling reform
of German, for example (or, for that matter, than the difference between
Shakespearian spelling of English from today's).

  You can compare texts (say http://www.unicode.org/udhr/d/udhr_cmn_hans.html
and http://www.unicode.org/udhr/d/udhr_cmn_hant.html) if you want to get
the idea.

	Arthur