anthony@batserver.cs.uq.oz (Anthony Lee) (06/19/89)
Anyone heard of a Chinese wordprocessor for News ? Anthony Lee (Humble PhD student) (alias Doctor(Time Lord)) ACSnet: anthony@batserver.cs.uq.oz TEL: (07) 3712651 (07) 3774139 (w) SNAIL: 243 Carmody Rd, St Lucia, 4067 Australia
jh@ist.CO.UK (Jeremy Huxtable) (06/29/89)
anthony@batserver.cs.uq.oz (Anthony Lee): > Anyone heard of a Chinese wordprocessor for News ? > Anthony Lee (Humble PhD student) (alias Doctor(Time Lord)) > ACSnet: anthony@batserver.cs.uq.oz TEL: (07) 3712651 > (07) 3774139 (w) > SNAIL: 243 Carmody Rd, St Lucia, 4067 Australia I've seen a few requests for this sort of thing so I'll throw in my contribution. I hope this doesn't count as plugging a commercial product. The company I used to work for does a Chinese input system for NeWS which comes with a simple editor. The input is by pinyin or radical with quick key access to common characters and a couple of other options which I hear they've added, such as zhuyinfuhao. The idea is that the input system opens a window containing a pinyin line, which intercepts all keyboard input. The input is converted to characters via whatever method is currently in use, and then the characters are distributed via the normal NeWS input mechanism to the current keyboard focus. Thus, Chinese characters can be typed into any NeWS application, and you have a virtual Chinese keyboard. Both click-to-type and cursor focus still work OK. The catch is, of course, that there are very few NeWS or UNIX applications out there which understand Chinese. To get you started, they have the editor, but this is not a word processor, just a plain text editor. They also give you a version of "psterm" which works in Chinese. If you do have any Chinese software out there, you can run it in that. Oh yes, they have Chinese fonts in traditional and simplifed, 24 and 16 point, for levels 1 and 2 of GB-2312, in NeWS format. The pinyin input system is the best I've seen. It deals with whole words and syntactic units rather than just single characters, and so is much better at getting the characters right. You can type really fast when you get used to it. It has a large dictionary with word generation rules which allow the input of phrases and numbers in one go (e.g. you can type "yiqianqibaisishiergeren" and get "1742 people" out first time without having to do each character separately. Their address is: Sindex Speech Technology 6 Southampton Place London W1 England They are not on the net, but I'd be willing to forward e-mail if there is not too much of it. I have no connection with the company apart from being friendly with the people there. Jeremy Huxtable.