Chinese Computing Newsletter; February, 2001 ============================================= CONTENTS ======== * Langoo.com: Write Chinese e-mail without a Chinese system * BijiWriter for WindowsCE * Chinese Handwriting Recognizer for Linux from IBM * New Chinese eBooks Website from TwinBridge * Site of the Month: Linguistic Data Consortium Chinese Page * Article of the Month: Setting up Chinese in Windows 2000 ARTICLES ======== ** Langoo.com: Write Chinese e-mail without a Chinese system A new service for sending and receiving Chinese e-mail is now avaible through Langoo.com. It allows registered users to send e-mail in simplified and traditional Chinese with out Chinese fonts or software. It also has multilingual chat, e-cards, and business cards. - Related Links http://www.langoo.com ** BijiWriter for WindowsCE Bijitec has released a free beta version of its handwriting input software for PocketPC's. While it claims to work with Chinese, the news report makes it clear that it does not do any Chinese character recognition, but instead remembers what the user writes as a picture. - Related Links http://www.bijitec.com http://www.bijitec.com/Netscape/News5.htm http://www.bijitec.com/IE/Downloads.asp#BW_CE ** Chinese Handwriting Recognizer for Linux IBM has recently released software to do Chinese handwriting recognition for simplified Chinese. It claims to be able to recognize all of the 6763 characters in the GB2312 character set. From the website: IBMCCR is an X11 Application which can translate handwriting scribbles to Chinese characters. By applying IBM's leading technology on digital ink recognition, this recognizer can recognize handwriting characters with cursive scribbles and different stroke order accurately at the speed of 5 characters per second on a Pentium II 200 machine. - Related Links http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/chinese4linux?open&l=888,t=gr,p=chinese ** New Chinese eBooks Website from TwinBridge TwinBridge now distributes Chinese books for the Microsoft PocketPC platform. Reading the books requires downloading the Microsoft reader program and the TwinBridge Chinese eBook font. Among the books currently available are "Shanhai Baby", "Around the World in 80 Days" by Jules Verne, and the complete Bible. Only books in traditional characters are currently available. - Related Links http://www.twinbook.com/eb/home.asp ** Site of the Month: Linguistic Data Consortium Chinese Page A useful resource for people interested in Chinese language processing and Chinese computing, this page lists several freely available dictionaries and Chinese corpora. It also has pages on Chinese information technology and Chinese and computer systems. - Related Links http://morph.ldc.upenn.edu/Projects/Chinese/ ** Article of the Month: Setting up Chinese in Windows 2000 Windows 2000 has an excellent level of built-in Chinese supports. Users have easy access to Chinese fonts and input methods. Set-up Enable Chinese Support From the Start button, select Settings and then the Control Panel. From the options on the Control Panel select "Regional Options". The General tab will give you the option to change your default locale, which is what programs running on your computer use to customize themselves for different languages and locations. Not all programs recognize and act on the locale, but many Microsoft programs do. You do not need to change this to any of the Chinese locales (which include Hong Kong, Taiwan, PRC, Singapore, and Macau) to enable Chinese support, but it may be a good change if you work primarily in Chinese. Also on the lower half of the "General" tab is the place to modify the language settings for your computer. Check on Simplified or Traditional Chinese (or both) depending on your needs. Windows will then ask you insert the Windows 2000 Install CD and copy over the files it needs. The system will need to reboot for the new settings to take effect. The "Advanced" button here will give you the opportunity to install conversion tables for various computer character sets (including many Chinese ones). However, the already installed defaults for Chinese should be sufficient for most users. Configure Input Methods Windows 2000 comes with a variety of Chinese input methods for both simplified and traditional Chinese characters. To use these input methods, open the "Regional Settings" window as described above, and select the "Input Locales" tab. Next, click the "Add" button, select the desired input locale (Chinese + country) and the specific input method for the locale. These include entry by pinyin, bopomofo (for Taiwan), Changjie, and others. After adding all the input methods you want to you, you can activate the input method by pressing the left Alt and Shift buttons together. You can also modify the activation keys in the same "Input Locales" window. If you check the "Enable indicator on Taskbar", then you can see the current input locale. You can directly click on this indicator (in the lower right) to change the current input locale). Enabling the indicator is recommended. Not every program will let you type with these input methods; some programs will only show question marks. Most Microsoft programs do support the input methods though, as do a growing number of other programs, including later versions of Netscape Navigator. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Please send suggestions for future Chinese Computing Newsletter items to erik@chinesecomputing.com. Reviews of software programs, announcements of upcoming releases, and other Chinese computing news is welcome and will be credited. Past issues of the newsletter can be accessed through the www.chinesecomputing.com site. Feel free to redistribute the newsletter for non-commercial use as long as you retain this notice. To remove yourself from the list, send an e-mail to newsletter@chinesecomputing.com. On the subject line write "remove your@email-address.com". 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