woodson@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU (Chas Woodson) (11/11/85)
Does anyone have a program to display Japanese characters? How about a wordprocessor using them? Is anybody working on same? .
thinfilm@uicsl.UUCP (11/14/85)
Cannon and apple had a joint project that was to have been completed by the end of this year, but unfortunately the project was canceled due to the fact that they decided that the japanese roms necessary along with the driving software would make the mac incompatible with the unaltered mac. ZThere are however japanese packages sold in japan for the mac as my friend there has one.
sumacc@uwmacc.UUCP (Rick Keir) (11/14/85)
Try "MacKana and Basic Kanji" fonts. Linguists' Software, Box 231 Mt. Hermon, CA 95041. (617) 468-3037. (This is different than the phone listed on some of their ads). List price $100, I've seen it advertised for $75. (These are FONTS, not a word processor. You still are typing left to right, not top down/right left.) They also make Hebrew, Tech, Greek and Cyrillic fonts. They have an international phonetic alphabet which I'm thinking about buying, since I'm having trouble getting a daisywheel with these characters. Usual disclaimer -- I just use their stuff, I don't work for them. -- Rick Keir -- MicroComputer Information Center, Rm 3130 MACC 1210 West Dayton St/U Wisconsin Madison/Mad WI 53706 {allegra, ihnp4, seismo}!uwvax!uwmacc!sumacc (OR) uwvax!uwmacc!rick
bantz@uiucuxc.CSO.UIUC.EDU (11/19/85)
Linguist's Software sells MacKana/Basic Kanji, fonts for the Mac. I haven't seen this product (and couldn't properly evaluate it if I had), but I have seen MacGreek from them; MacGreek is pretty nice: it doesn't merely have the Greek alphabet, but all the required breathing and accent marks, which in (ancient) Greek can be *combined* to produce some pretty messy-looking characters. Fonts included several sizes, and bold and italics works too. For $69 through MacConnection.
sas1@sphinx.UChicago.UUCP (Stuart Schmukler) (11/19/85)
There is a Japanese WP for the Mac called EgWord. I saw it at MacExpo -- working well (but since I don't know Japanese I'm no judge). Also, I am not sure who the US distributor is. SaS
thinfilm@uicsl.UUCP (11/20/85)
I wrote a short note before and forgot to p sign it. I have a japanese friend who has a 512K mac and helped him do some research on getting a true japanese word processor (ie. that supports a few thousand kanji like the NEC PC-100 that I have at home does - ie. to a japanese a word processor without a few thousand kanji is of little practical value and is more of a toy). In any case the linguist software is an alternate font that fits in the space previously defined for other fonts. As such it is much smaller a selection than that which is needed. One could write notes in kana, but this is not really adequate either. I am sure that there are japanese word processors for the mac in Japan. I will write (actually I will go) and find out their names. They probably are not distributed here though (there is no market). Paul Fons {ihnp4,pur-ee}!uiucdcs!uicsl!thinfilm Coordinated Science Lab 1101 W. Springfield Urbana, IL. 61801
haruyama@ut-sally.UUCP (Shinichiro Haruyama) (11/20/85)
> Does anyone have a program to display Japanese characters? > How about a wordprocessor using them? > Is anybody working on same? A Japanese start up company called Ergonomics Software Products International Corporation in Tokyo announced a new Japanese word processor "EgWord" ( which is pronounced "easy word" ) this summer. It does not require any hardware change to Macintosh. Since there is a one to one correspondence between Japanese Kanas and English alphabets, a user can use a regular alpha- bet keyboard to input Japanese text. The input is displayed on a Mac screen either by Katakanas, Hirakanas, or alpha- bets. Usually Kanjis which are very similar to Chinese characters have more than one pronunciations. When a user wants to use kanjis rather than kanas, he/she can let Mac do the conversion from kanas to kanjis. I have used EgWord and found that the conversion was quite fast: just a few seconds for a text which contains about one hundred kanji words. The accuracy of conversion is also very good. This software comes with three disks: a system disk, a font disk. and a dictionary disk and can be obtained either from Ergonomics Software Products International Corporation or from Canon in Tokyo. Ergonomics Software Products International Corporation is selling another Japanese softwares for Macintosh called EgBridge. Using EgBridge a user can use many American made Mac softwares such as Mac Paint, Multiplan, and MS-Chart with Japanese characters. This September, Canon announced Dyna Mac which accelerates EgWord, by using a ROM which contains Japanese font patterns. This speeds up the display of texts on a screen or on a printer, though a hardware change is needed. The address of Ergonomics Software Products Interna- tional Corporation is Taneda Bldg., 5F. 1-2-5 Moto-Akasaka, Minato-ku Tokyo 107 Japan. Tel. (Japan) 3-478-2234. I do not work for either Ergonomics Software Products International Corporation or Canon. Shinichiro Haruyama The University of Texas at Austin