From: Micky Wong <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 7 Dec 1992 15:23:09 EST

Steve Silberstein <[email-masked]> asks:
Subject:      E-TIEN, BIG5, & multi-national character sets

Comments: To: [email-masked]

>Can anyone help me with this?
> 1. I understand E-TIEN runs only with certain VGA chips like the
>    Tseng Labs chip. Is this true? Does this mean that E-TIEN can
>    not be used with all VGA monitors?

For ETen 2.0, I had problem with VGA display card with TSENG-4000
chip, so I used ET-16E(For EGA resolution) to circumvent the problem.

For ETen 3.0, I had tried VGA resolution with ETen using display
cards of TSENG-4000 chip, Orchard chip, IBM8514, they all worked OK.

Eten supports Hercules, EGA 640x350, VGA 640X480.
If you have display was configured higher than 640X480, the Eten
driver will change it back to 640X480 resolution.
This applies for ETen 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0 for the Fai-Die (Flying Saucer)
product line.

To use higher resolution 600X800 and 1024X768, and screen font of
24 X 24 Chinese display, you need to buy very expensive display
cards from Eten.

> 2. Has anyone built a set of "user defined" characters for E-TIEN
>that adds to the BIG5 set the 2,300 Korean characters and/or
>the 3-4,000 simplified characters so that E-TIEN can display
>on the same screen characters from Chinese (mainland and Taiwan),
>Japan and Korea, all on the same screen?
>How about Thai or other languages?

Eten has it's own product to support the Korea Kanji set.
Like another netter pointed out, Eten does sell option to support
the simplified Chinese character set to support the mainland market.
I have heard that there are people bought Eten to support the Arabic.

> 3. Or is there another package that does this?

Theoretically, the Chinese Window also has character build utility
to implement user defined characters.

> 4. What are the relative merits of E-TIEN vs Kuo Chaio or other
  equivalent packages? (especially as related to 1.) & 2.) above) ?

As a non-business end user of Eten for more than 5 years, My personal
view on Eten is: This is a product of very high overall quality.
It's implementation of input methods are the best among the dozen
or so of other products that I have tried.  The ergonomics of it's
special keys are excellent. {this could be a biased view from someone
have used it for more than 5 years. :-) }

It can run many off-the-shelf software applications without modification.
The Eten 3.0 allows you to load many modules into higher memory, I was
able to load the Eten and other multimedia stuff into the upper memory,
still have more than 580K left in lower memory to run application.

Eten does not support scalable fonts, comes with Eten 3.0 are 6 types of
bitmap fonts. but when you print enlarged fonts, the Eten 3.0 provide
a new module called fntdrv.com, which does smooth out the edges, to
achieve the approximate appearance of scalable fonts.

I have printed out some Chinese couplet using Chinese calligraphic font,
people were asking: Who wrote it?

For a product sells less than US$100.00, my personal view about this
product is, it is the best value of Chinese computing you can find on
the market.

I need to emphasize that all the opinion about Eten are my personal
view as a casual home user in the last 5 years, after 3 upgrades and
2 different products.

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Organization: IBM Canada Laboratory
Disclaimer: This posting represents the poster's views, not those of IBM
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