yeung@june.cs.washington.edu (Ricky Yeung) (06/10/88)
Has anybody tried out Apple's Chinese Systems? There are two versions: Bejing
version (simplified, BH for short) and Taipei version (unsimplified, TH for
short). BH uses pinyin and bi3 xing2 (stroke) methods for input while TH
uses zhu4 yin1 and cang1 jie2 methods. The BH bixing method is particular
interesting (I'm from Hong Kong, my pinyin is not too good),
since I can always construct the character stroke by stroke or I
can take some short cut. On the average, it takes me 3 to 4 keys plus a
selection to input a character. Another interesting thing is, bixing
can be somewhat mixed with pinyin to speed up the input process. In short,
BH is by far the best Chinese system that I've ever seen.
On the other hand, the TH system has the following disadvantages:
1. it's very slow
2. the zhu4 yin1 keys don't map to the keyboard keys (e.g. 'm' is mapped to the
'a' key), which is very confusing to people who get used to the QWERT
keyboard.
3. the cang1 jie2 input method is just brain damaging compared to bixing.
4. The TH characters are not quite good-looking.
As far as we know, the BH and the TH systems are not compatible.
What we want is to have the input methods of BH and the display of
unsimplified characters.
Therefore, my friend and I have developed a simple program that can convert BH
files to TH files, and backward. In addition, one can replace the
BH font file by the TH font file using our program.
Whoever wants to get a copy of the conversion program can contact me.
Here are our questions:
1. TH was developed in Taiwan, does anybody know if BH was developed in
Mainland?
2. The system comes with a DA (desk accessory) that you can look up the bixing
strokes, or pinyins from the character codes. However, we would like to do it
inside a program, and Apple provides no documentation for that purpose. Does
anybody know the internal workings and willing to offer some pointers? Any
info regarding these systems would help.
We would like to make our conversion program more interactive (e.g. to solve
ambiguity, for instance, some BH has more than one mapping to TH,
like the "yun" character which can map to "say" or
"cloud") and do other interesting developments.
These require more knowledge on the internal workings of the BH & TH systems.
Please send e-mail to :
yeung@june.cs.washington.edu
or {allegra,caip,ihnp4,nike}!uw-beaver!uw-june!yeung
OR
lee@shasta.stanford.edu
-Ricky Yeung