From: Allen Haaheim (haaheima@interchange.ubc.ca)
Date: Sun Mar 23 2003 - 17:25:29 EST
This is good news for me, thanks a lot.
--Allen
----- Original Message -----
From: Chris Pratley
To: Allen Haaheim ; Erik.Ostermueller@alltel.com
Cc: unicode@unicode.org
Sent: Saturday, March 22, 2003 6:11 PM
Subject: RE: CJK question
Win2000 can be made to support Ext B characters. Download the support package at:
http://www.microsoft.com/china/windows2000/downloads/18030.asp
Office2000 does NOT support Ext B or any Unicode characters above plane 0, but OfficeXP does.
The Proofing Tools for Office2000 naturally do not include support for Ext B since Office2000 does not support that.
The Proofing Tools for OfficeXP include a GB18030 font that covers Ext B (and one for plane 0 CJK and Ext A). It also includes a rudimentary IME for these characters based on character code.
The Insert Symbol dialog in OfficeXP has been improved to allow you to search by Unicode value (as well as larger glyphs, resizable, appearing in all apps, etc). In Word2002 (OfficeXP) you can also enter a Unicode character directly by typing the character value in hex and then using the Alt-X shortcut.
Chris
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: unicode-bounce@unicode.org on behalf of Allen Haaheim
Sent: Sat 3/22/2003 4:12 PM
To: Erik.Ostermueller@alltel.com
Cc: unicode@unicode.org
Subject: Re: CJK question
I'm not sure but I think Proofing Tools can be used with Win2000. I don't have it installed now, but I am sure there were still some graphs that I couldn't find.
I have found some of the graphs I'm looking for in the "CJK Unified Ideographs Extension B" chart. After reading up on GB18030 (thanks for that), it seems that "[s]ince GB18030 is fully ISO 10646 compatible, it readily supports CJK Extension B and other languages." I don't have the GB18030 font or Extension B Charset in my machine. Can I load CJK Extensions A and B without switching to XP? I would prefer to use Win2000, or the ME which I am running now, but if necessary I can use XP.
Allen
----- Original Message -----
From: Erik.Ostermueller@alltel.com
To: haaheima@interchange.ubc.ca ; unicode@unicode.org
Sent: Friday, March 21, 2003 12:34 PM
Subject: RE: CJK question
Have you tried the MS-Office Proofing Tools?
It contains a font for GB 18030 characters as well as
an updated version of the MS IME.
The install program forces you to have MS-Office XP installed.
However, I've seen comments on the web suggesting that you can
use it without XP.
--Erik Ostermueller
-----Original Message-----
From: Allen Haaheim [mailto:haaheima@interchange.ubc.ca]
Sent: Friday, March 21, 2003 1:48 PM
To: unicode@unicode.org
Subject: CJK question
Hello,
First my apologies if I have missed something already available on the Unicode website that I should have already known, as well as for my total lack of expertise in the fields commonly under discussion in this forum. If anyone knows of a more appropriate place towards which I should direct my woes, I would be glad to hear of it.
I work with Classical Chinese texts which contain numerous characters not in any character sets I use (Arial Unicode MS; CJK Unified Ideographs), or know of. I was delighted to see that most--if not all--of the graphs I need are in Unicode charts. However they all seem to be images, so it seems that I cannot use them. I need to be able to both input and display the rare graphs in my MS system. As far as I can tell, what I may need to do is add characters to my existing character sets, or get new character sets altogether.
For example, in a website I commonly use to view reliable, annotated editions of source texts www.chant.org (Chinese Ancient Texts Center at the Chinese U of Hong Kong), I frequently encounter blank spaces where rare graphs are located. (I have downloaded all their fontpacks.)
Third-party layovers with "font-maker" utilities such as Twinbridge or Chinese Star are too unstable, in my experience causing frequent crashes. Furthermore they are not always convertible to or compatible with unicode. The most stable setup I have found for a PC is a localized version of Win2000, however the MS input methods for Chinese are much too cumbersome and slow, cover only a portion of the language, of course have no font-maker utility, and do not even seem to be able to retrieve all the graphs stored in my existing character sets.
Besides Chinese and Japanese graphs, I also need to occasionally enter Latin or other letters with diacritical marks, such as romanized Sanskrit (for Buddhist terms), IPA symbols, and others, but I cannot always find them in the character sets I have. Some of you should get a chuckle (or a groan) to learn that I'm manually searching through character sets in "Insert (drop-down); Symbol..." in MS Word 2000 to find them. Of course their location gets memorized after a while--but this gets more difficult with CJK graphs! (They're not true ideographs, by the way--they are mostly logographic.)
I realize there may be no easy solution for my problem, but any advice would be greatly appreciated.
From a frustrated sinologist,
Allen Haaheim
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