Chinese Computing Newsletter; October, 1999, v.1
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Included in this issue:

* MS Word 2000 Chinese Support
* Perl 5.6 and Unicode
* Java 1.3 Includes Non-OS Input Method Support
* GNU Emacs 20.4 for Windows



* MS Word 2000 Chinese Support

     Word97 introduced a whole new level of multilingual support by
using Unicode as its encoding.  With the introduction of Office 2000,
Microsoft Word improves its multilingual support further by
automatically reading and writing many different encodings.  The Open
and SaveAs File dialogs include an option for "Encoded Text".  If
selected, Word will give you the option to save the document as text
in one of several different encodings, including GB, HZ, EUC, Big5,
UTF-8 and Unicode.  It can also read and convert to Unicode files in
all of these encodings.

     Word 2000 also supports Simplified/Traditional Chinese
conversion.  From the main menu, select Tools->Language->Chinese
Translation.  You will have the option to select the conversion
direction.  Many East Asian language related formatting options
are also from Format->Asian Layout.

     Microsoft's CJK Input Methods that formerly only worked with
Internet Explorer and Outlook now also work with Office 2000.  After
installation, the input language can switched by pressing Alt+Shift.
Unfortunately, Microsoft only includes a BoPoMoFo method to input
traditional Chinese.  Simplified Chinese uses pinyin.  Character
selection is context-sensitive, i.e. the input method will try to
determine the proper character for a pinyin sound based on the
possible word it is in.

Related Links:

Microsoft CJK Input Methods
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/features/ime.asp     

							 

* Perl 5.6 and Unicode

   Perl 5.6 will include the option of using UTF-8 as its internal
encoding.  After including the "use utf8;" pragma in your Perl
program, operations that once operated on the byte level in strings
will now work on the character level.  Regular expressions, substr,
length, etc. will all work with characters.  This makes working with
Chinese as easy working with English.  No word yet on whether support
will be included for reading and writing files in different encodings.
Example programs will be included in future newsletters.

Further Information:

In-depth Information on using Unicode in Perl5.6
http://users.erols.com/eepeter/chinesecomputing/programming/perl-unicode.txt

Brief Discussion of Perl Unicode Support
http://www.perl.com/pub/1999/06/perl5-6.html#unicode

Description of using XML with Perl, the main motivation for adding
Unicode support to Perl
http://www.perl.com/pub/1998/11/xml.html



* Java 1.3 Includes Non-OS Input Method Support

     Previous versions of the Java Foundation Classes included support
for communicating with the input methods of the operating system, but
did not have a standard way of including pure Java input methods.
With the introduction of the Input Method Engine SPI in Java 1.3, the 
need for platform independent input methods has finally been filled.

     With this new specification, programmers can create their own
input methods and package them into a JAR file.  Including this
JAR file in the lib/ext subdirectory in the main Java directory
will make the input method available to all Java programs using
that JVM.  This will be useful to programmers who want to write
Chinese programs to be used on non-Chinese platforms.

Further Information:

JavaSoft's Page on IME SPI
http://java.sun.com/products/jdk/1.3/docs/guide/imf/index.html

JavaSoft's Tutorial on Creating New Input Methods
http://java.sun.com/products/jdk/1.3/docs/guide/imf/spi-tutorial.html



* GNU Emacs 20.4 for Windows

     Programmers looking for a free, powerful, multilingual text
editor on Windows 95/98/NT will want to check out the latest release
of GNU Emacs for Windows.  With this release, the multilingual
abilities of Mule have been folded back into Emacs.  Emacs now
supports the display of multiple languages at once, will display
Chinese directly without the need for helper programs if you have
Chinese fonts on your system, and has free input methods for Chinese,
including pinyin, zhuyin, English, 4corner, and Cantonese.  In
addition, Emacs supports Japanese, Korean, many European languages,
and more.

     Add this to Emacs' ability to act as a development enviroment for
many different programming languages, including Perl, Java, C, and
Tcl/Tk and it may be on the only text editor you'll need.

Further Information:

GNU Emacs for Windows Page
http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/windows/ntemacs.html

UTF-8 Support for Emacs
http://www.cs.ust.hk/~otfried/Mule


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