chou@umn-cs.CS.UMN.EDU (Chih-Hsiang Chou) (10/03/89)
In article <10627@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> clye@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Christopher Lye) writes: > >For those who are still interested here's what I know: >Mac China costs about HK$1000 = US$128 >Using its own screen fonts it changes all text on the screen to >Chinese characters. I am not sure whether these were simplified or >traditional since I only had a passing glance at the screen. But the >changes are everywhere: menu bar, window names, menu choices, file names >etc. > >I believe you can also do word processing with the package as well. > >For more information contact: >Kenny Wan of ACTRON Consultant co. >21-22 1/F Wonder Building >161-175 Fuk Wah St. >Sham Shui Po, Kowloon Hong Kong >Tel: (852)3-7256263 >Fax: (852)3-725-0105 > Here is what I know about the MacChina from a friend of mine. MacChina is a Chinese system developed by the Great Eastern Software Co. located in Taipei, Taiwan, Republic of China. It allows users of Mac Plus, SE, II or later to key in Chinese characters almost anywhere you can key in the English letter. So, for example. you can do Chinese word processing (with mixed fonts, point sizes, styles ... etc, as in English), paint/draw with Chinese text, use Chinese filename or even customize the menu, dialog, alert ... resources. Unlike the ChineseTalk, MacChina runs in normal MacOS. It doesn't even contain an INIT or cdev. You activate the MacChina just like you open an application. After that it remains on until you restart or shutdown. However, it's copy protected. You have to re-fresh the system after about 30 times of activation, though re-freshing is as easy as inserting the master diskette into the floppy disk drive. Great Eastern sells its Chinese system in two product lines. The first one, MacChina, is a single font (one of many Chinese fonts) Chinese system while the second one, MacChina II, allows you use Chinese fonts among 24 point FungSung, LiSu, ShingSu and KaiSu. Other than that both have the same functionality. The latest version of MacChina II I've seen is 3.1, created in August 1989. The retail price of MacChina and MacChina II are about NT$16800 ($670) and NT$37800 ($1500) respectively. Students can get a 40% off discount. MacChina requires system 4.2 or later, a hard disk and numeric keypad. As for the input method, it has a complete set of 5 Chinese character input methods, including TsangChi, Phonetic, Simple, PinYin and Phrase. Chinese characters can be entered either by keyboard or mouse. Each input method has a user configurable window showing the keyboard layout, key mapping, the current input sequence and the final matched characters. One nice feature of MacChina's input method is that for a matched character entered by method A you can show the same character's key sequence in method B without leaving method A. Character bitmaps can also be modified or created by the accompanied DA, MacChina Tool. For more information, contact P.O. Box 26-648 Great Eastern Software Co., Ltd. Taipei, Taiwan Republic of China Tel: 011-886-2-711-4375 or 011-886-2-711-4449 Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with the above company except been very impressed by their product.