leue@galen.crd.ge.com (Bill Leue) (12/30/89)
Does anyone know of any freeware or shareware screen fonts for the Japanese hiragana and/or katakana alphabets? I looked in the sumex-aim fonts directory, but didn't see anything. What I am looking for is some screen fonts that will work with any old (English) word processor. A Japanese word processor is >not< really needed for what I am trying to do -- namely, practice the little bit of Japanese that I know and perhaps insert some Japanese strings into a regular English-language document. For those who don't know any Japanese, the hiragana and katakana alphabets do NOT have thousands of characters -- you're thinking of kanji, the ideographic alphbet based on Chinese characters. That alphabet does require a dedicated Japanese/Chinese word processor and the ability to handle 16-bit ASCII. However, the hiragana and katakana are much smaller, phonetic alphabets that fit comfortably into the 8-bit ASCII range. I've been tinkering around trying to make a font of my own, but I'm hampered by not owning Fontastic or some other good font editor -- and ResEdit's font editing is a little to hairy for me to hack with no documentation :-(. BTW, if anyone out there has been working on this problem, I'd be interested to hear what scheme you've come up with for mapping hiragana characters to a US keyboard. Sadly, you really need 5 key mappings for each key to get all the syllables mapped 'naturally'; e.g., the 'K' column in the hirgana 'ABC's has five entries, for 'KA', 'KI', 'KU', 'KE', and 'KO'. But there's only 4 different ways to map the 'K' key into different characters, using normal, shifted, option, and option-shift modifier keys. Frustrating! Has anyone come up with a neat-o scheme? -Bill Leue leue@crd.ge.com