Subject: Re: FAQ: What the hell is CCCII? (Was Re: 26000

From: Wang Wei <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 27 Aug 1993 13:30:45 -0400

On Fri, 27 Aug 1993, Avron A. Boretz wrote:

> Thanks to Christian Wittern for his multi-tiered reply regarding CCCII. If
> he (or some able and altruistic soul) were really able to provide fonts
> for this character set for Windows or DOS (and for FREE!), his/her name
> would truly liu2fang1bai3shi4 (a fragrance that flows through 100
> generations!).

To make this character set usable in Windows is pretty easy (as far as I
can iamgine now, since I've done one for GB). But I really wonder with
about 40MB in a font file, how far can Windows go? Will it be really
slowed down? This might not be directly related to CCNET's themes, but I'd
really want to know it, maybe I can help move it into Windows (Only as
bitmaped font, though).

Regards.

Wang Wei  [MS CS, Central Michigan University
          [1532 S.Mission, Apt.209S, Mt.Pleasant, MI 48858 (517-773-1656)

---

From: christian wittern <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 27 Aug 1993 23:35:04 JST

Well, it seems we got some thread going :-)

  Hu Bo, Munich, asks:
  >
  > What is about the compatibility to the standard ASCII
  > character set? Does the CCCII system use some special
  > escape sequence to distinguish between ASCII and CCCII?

  Yes, that is exactly what they do. This is reuired by ISO 2022

  > Bo

  Stephen G. Simpson writes:

  >  > It includes over 50,000 64*64 bitmap Chinese
  >  > character patterns.
  >
  > Wow!  Are these bitmaps public domain?  How hard would it be to
  > extract 64x64 bitmap fonts for GB/simplified and Big5/traditional?  It
  > would be wonderful if these GB and Big5 fonts could be created and put
  > into the public domain.  I could use them for my own programs, and so
  > could many other people.

  Extracting BIG5 Fonts would be very easy, I think. The database,
  which comes with the fonts includes mappings for BIG5.
  If I have time over the weekend, I'll try something and post it.
  For GB it is not so straightforward, as the mappings are not included
  in this package, so they would have to be acquired otherwise.
  By the way, the charactershapes are some mixture of Song-, Ming- and
  something resembling Kai-ti - But at least you can print in a
  good resolution.

  Why not include at least the regular characters (42000) in your
  programs? I think, it would also worthwile to create some good
  TeX-Fonts for it.

  > Stephen G. Simpson
  > Department of Mathematics, Pennsylvania State University
  > 333 McAllister Building, University Park, State College, PA 16802
  > Office phone: +1 814 863-0775      Internet: [email-masked]
  > Home phone: +1 814 238-2274        Bitnet: T20 AT PSUVM
  > FAX: +1 814 865-3735

  Chris Delucia writes:

  > In an ftpsite directory, I can't remember which one, I came across some
  > files called "cccii.tbl" and "chgcode.exe" which apparently allow for
  > character conversion between CCCII and Big-5. I didn't check it out, but
  > I got the "readme" file on it. I called up the company that sold this

  I would be *very* interested. Could you mail me at least the readme-file.
  And if you could come up with the location, that would be marvelous!

  > I guess there are two ways of being able to meet my needs - an affordable
  > CCCII-like program that comes with virtually every character that appears
  > in extant texts, or a program that's more streamlined but has a good
  > character creation utility. I currently use ETEN Flying Saucer (Feidie)
  > #5, which has a 24 X 24 pixel (for printing out) character editor. It's
  > not pretty, but it works. A few months ago, in the process of inputting
  > some Han dynasty literature, I created about 50 characters. Naturally,
  > I didn't bother to create variant character forms unless there was something
  > otherwise significant to discuss about it. Let's say there were @ 40
  > that were unique characters. Of these 40 or so, I was able to locate most
  > (@ 30) in vol 2 of _The Unicode Standard_. So, much better than Big-5, but
  > I still would have had to create several characters.

  It certainly depends for what purpose you input texts. We are talking
  about databases which are designed to be usable for a while. This is
  a situation like the craftsmen, who made the first wooden blockprints
  found theirselves in. If these texts are to be used as a base for
  research *every* *single* deviation matters.

  > If someone only encounters the
  > need to create a character a few times a year, it's probably not worth
  > hundreds or thousands of dollars to have 30,000 characters sit there on your
    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  > hard drive. I'm not familiar with all the types of character editing/
  > creating utilities, but I do know that Chinese Windows has TrueType fonts,
  > but a TrueType font editor still does not exist.

    I hope we could come up with something for free, now that the fonts
    are available. I'm studying the possibility to make the fonts available
    as Bitmaps in MS-Windows, which could be pasted even in the English
    version (or any version, for that matter) of Word f. Windows and
    similar wordprocessors.

  >                         Chris DeLucia
  >                         [email-masked]

  Please excuse this anusual way of replying, but I wanted to get this
  out, before or host goes sleeping for the weekend, which is in a few
  minutes.

  Enjoy,

  Christian Wittern, Kyoto