Chinese Computing Newsletter; February, 2000, v.4
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CONTENTS
========

* Adobe Introduces Asian Font Packs for Acrobat 4.0 Reader 
* SlangSoft to Introduce "Spirus" Pure Java Input Methods
* Freeworld Offers Website Encoding and Graphics Converters
* Pinyin Input Methods for Java Now Available
* Unicode 3.0 Includes Ideographic Description Method

* Site of the Month: BasisTech
* Code Sample of the Month:   Searching for Chinese fonts using Java




ARTICLES
========

** Adobe Introduces Asian Font Packs for Acrobat 4.0 Reader 

   Adobe Acrobat 4.0 introduces the ability to include Chinese and
other East Asian languages in a PDF document and be able to display
them in any other language version of Acrobat.  This can be done by
either embedding the fonts in the document or downloading the
appropriate font pack to the computer with the Acrobat viewer.  The
font packs are quite large though (10 megabytes for the simplified
Chinese pack).

 - Contributed by Daniel Baird

Related Links
http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/cjkfontpack.html



** SlangSoft to Introduce "Spirus" pure Java Input Methods

   SlangSoft has made available a new collection of input methods and
virtual keyboards taking advantage of Java2 v1.3's improved support
for internationalization.  Input methods are available for 42
different languages, including Chinese.

Related Links
http://www.slangsoft.com/code/spirus.html



** Freeworld Offers Website Encoding and Graphics Converters

   Freeworld-2000 now offers services to convert web pages between
Big5 and GB, and to also convert web pages in Chinese, Japanese, or
Korean into graphics that can be viewed on any language web browser.
Users will have to put up with banner adds for the free versions of
the services.  The user interface also takes up a large portion of the
browser area.

Related Links
http://www.freeworld-2000.com/ctext/
http://www.freeworld-2000.com/unitext/



** Pinyin Input Methods for Java Now Available

  As reported in an earlier newletter, Java 2 v1.3 now includes the
ability to add pure Java input methods as extensions that can be used
by any Java program.  Using the input method tutorial at JavaSoft, I
have created six Chinese input methods for simplified, traditional,
and mixed characters using pinyin.  Source code is included with the
input methods.

Related Links
http://users.erols.com/eepeter/chinesecomputing/programming/java.html#input



** Unicode 3.0 Includes Ideographic Description Method

  New to Unicode 3.0 is a system for describing characters not found
in the current specification.  The method relies on the fact that most
characters are composed of other characters in certain common
patterns.  Starting at U+2FF0, the new revision also includes a set of
ideographic description characters that can be used with a standard
algorithm to show the relative positions of component characters.
Unfortunately, I have not found an on-line description of the
algorithm.  It is included in the new Unicode Standard 3.0 book.

Related Links
http://www.unicode.org/unicode/uni2book/u2.html
http://www.hclrss.demon.co.uk/unicode/ideographic_description_characters.html
http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/unicode/unidata2F.html
The Unicode Standard 3.0, p. 268-271.



** Site of the Month:  Basis Technology Corp.

    Basis Technology, headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, makes
a variety of Chinese lingustic software tools, including a Chinese
script converter, morphological analyzer, and XML document publisher.
BasisTech also makes C++ libraries for processing Unicode and is a
member of the Unicode Consortium.

Related Links
http://www.basistech.com



** Code Sample of the Month:  Searching for Chinese fonts using Java

// Begin Code Sample

// Determine which fonts support Chinese here ...
Font[] allfonts = GraphicsEnvironment.getLocalGraphicsEnvironment().getAllFonts();
int fontcount = 0;
String chinesesample =  // A representative sample of simplified Chinese characters
    "\u7684\u662F\u4E0D\u6211\u4E00\u6709\u5927\u5728\u4EBA\u4E86\u4E2D" +
    "\u5230\u8981\u4EE5\u53EF\u8FD9\u4E2A\u4F60\u4F1A\u597D";

for (int j = 0; j < allfonts.length; j++) {
    if (allfonts[j].canDisplayUpTo(chinesesample) == chinesesample.length()) {
	// Due to a bug in the JVM, all logical fonts are included, whether they 
	// work or not, so I remove them from consideration here
	if (allfonts[j].getFontName().startsWith("dialog") == false &&
	    allfonts[j].getFontName().startsWith("monospaced") == false &&
	    allfonts[j].getFontName().startsWith("sansserif") == false &&
	    allfonts[j].getFontName().startsWith("serif") == false) {
	    System.out.println(allfonts[j].getFontName());
	}
	fontcount++;
    }
}

// End Code Sample

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