
>From: wang@pennmess.physics.upenn.edu ( Huangxin Wang)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.china
Subject: Chinese on Macintosh:  Reply to a FAQ
Date: 1 Nov 91 21:38:44 GMT

If you are alreay reading Hua Xia Wen Zhai regularly on Mac, then
ignore this message.

		Chinese  on  Macintosh Computer

If you want to use (read, write) Chinese on Macintosh, you just need to
install Chinese System or Chinese script, thus making the Chinese
characters avaiable to all Macintosh softwares.  With this, in
principle, you can use any Mac word processor to edit Chinese (Chinese
become an addition font in your Mac system), but the best one is Nisus
from Paragon (800-922-2993) $99 for students or academic order.  But
remember Nisus has nothing to do with Chinese, it can handle smoothly
all international scripts, including Chinese, Japanese, Arabian.  It is a
powerful word processor at the same level as MSWord 4, but it has many
features that are not possible in Word.

Also you can use Chinese with HyperCard, painting, drawing softwares,
etc., just as you do with a regular Mac.  Basically, this is similar to
adding in a new font, then this font will be available to all your
softwares.

In priciple, you can install other scripts into your Macintosh, for
example, Traditional Chinese (Taiwan System), or Japanese.

The mainland simplified Chinese (Beijing System) use GB code, pinyin is
the standard input method, but you can choose others.  Current version
is 6.07, works on all Macintosh.  Taiwan system uses big5, you can also
use mainland's pinyin method for inputting.

All these International Systems (and script) are available on the
d e v e l o p magazine (by Apple) for $30/year: 800-545-9364
They are on the CD disk come with every issue (4 issues/year).
Back-issue is about $10/issue.  The one with CH 6.07 is on Issue 8.

------
Huangxin Wang ~{Muh+vN~}, University of Pennsylvania


         *       *        *       *        *         *        *

                    Info about Chinese OS 7.1


Date:         Wed, 28 Apr 1993 16:12:03 EDT
From: Martin Heijdra <MHEIJDRA@PUCC.BITNET>
Subject:      Chinese 7.1
To: Multiple recipients of list CCNET-L <CCNET-L@UGA.BITNET>
Status: R

One can find a beta version of Simplified Chinese 7.1 on the April World
System Software CD-ROM disk; this is NOT the Develop CD-ROM disk, one has
to register at APDA as a certified developer for some $300. If Chinese
is all you want, it might be better to wait until Apple publishes commercially
the Chinese language module: the Japanese one, just made avialable, costs
$249; I expect the Chinese ones to be cheaper (less fonts). Good news:
it's really a big improvement over 6.0.7.

Traditional Chinese is not even at the official beta-stage yet; it will
incorporate Panasonic Hanin input however, so that's an improvement as well.

I do expect a great difference between those products which will be 100%
WorldScript compatible, and those which will not. For the moment, the star
is Nisus, which has a full multilingual version 3.4 which even has language
specific features as kashida's for Arabic, furigana for Japanese, etc.
As they say in their manual, Chinese and Thai-specific feautures are still
lacking, and can only be added after Apple makes the Chinese language modules
officially available; they will appear however. Other programs are compatible
but do not support inline input; yet others (Microsoft Word...) are only
for the patient.

Martin Heijdra, Gest Oriental Library, Princeton University

