multiByte char (kanji)
28 messages in this thread
I am looking into the possibility of porting an application to a mulit-byte
character language, specifically Kanji. I need to locate a good C compiler
for the Amiga that support this.
Does anyone have some experience or views they would like to share?
– Jerry Isdale
I think C mavens like talking about multi-byte support in magazines, but I
can't recall any PC-based compiler that really does it. Do you really want
to learn trigraphs? 🙂 When you say Kanji support, you don't mean
writing C code in Kanji, you mean multi-byte character support within the
compiler, right? They just sent out the first draft of Unicode a few weeks
ago, didn't they?
Gad. I do NOT want to use tri-graphs, nor do I want to program in Kanji (or
one of the 3 other Japanese character sets). What I need to do is handle
kanji (and the other char sets) text on an Amiga. I could fake handling the
characters, but I'd like to make it clean with the two-byte char that the
standard folks have been kicking around for years. I wasnt sure what the
status was.
Are you just needing Japanese fonts? There were a couple of those in a
Japanese tutorial that I uploaded to one of the libraries a couple of years
ago. I don't know if it is still there, but I still have the disk. The
author of the tutorials had modified two of the regular workbench fonts so
that the extended part of the character set presented the characters needed
to write in Japanese. I think there were three of those sets, but I'm not
really sure. It's been a long time.
This tutorial may no longer be in the libraries if it had not been
downloaded for a long time. I can re-up it if you think it would be of any
help to you.
I'd love to see that…I've been toying with the idea of learning simple
Japanese…(enough to do a simple application, anyway)
Japanese is surprising RPN… stack the subject, add "wah", stack the
direct object, add "oh", stack the verb with its modifier, and you've got a
sentence. As for Kanji, it takes about 1800 glyphs to read the paper or
graduate from high school. In my first year of college Japanese, I think
they asked us to learn just a few hundred.
While I'd like to learn enough to read the newspaper, all I really need is
an understanding of how the language works, how their writing works, etc.
(Basically what I have for German, Italian, Spanish)
Of course, it would be fun to see the Seven Samurai and understand the
words ! 🙂
andy
I don't know if you get cable in your area – gee, you must, since the QVC
shopping channel is based in West Chester – but there is a Japanese course
on the Mind Extension University channel. We have TCI cable here in
Madison, maybe it's peculiar to that conglomerate.
The nice thing about learning the Kanji is that the majority of them are
the same as the Chinese, although they are pronounced differently in each
language. This means you can go to a truly Chinese restaurant and realize
that the Chinese on the menu is as uninformative as menus I've seen in
Mexico, to wit: "Meat", "Soup", "Fish", without an additional word of
explanation. Also, you can now read "Do Not Eat" on the desiccant packages
you find in electronic packaging.
Thanks, I might give that a try, depending on when they start their next
course cycle.
andy
Speaking of QVC, if you know anyone in West Chester who knows Molly Daly…
ask her if she has a fan club.
OK. Though, not being a QVC watcher myself, I've no idea who she is 🙂
andy
I'll archive it and send it up tomorrow. It will be in AmigaUser.
Thanks!
andy
I can recommend "Read Japanese Today" by Len Walsh and published by Tuttle
for a very simple introduction to kanji. For hiragana and katakana, I
highly recommend "Easy Hiragana" and "Easy Katakana", both published by
Passport Books. The katakana volume is greatly superior to the hiragana,
but both are pretty good. To learn to speak, there is a highly superior
textbook which I believe is published only in Australia. I was taught from
a bootleg photocopy made by my teacher from her son's original, and I have
no idea how or where he got the original other than Australia.
When I am underway with producing 3×5 flashcards with my scanner and DTP.
I'd be willing to upload the files if you're really serious about learning
the kanji. I will eventually have somewhat over 800 kanji based on the 2
texts I have now, "Reading Japanese", part of a 3 volume set from the Yale
Language series, and "Reading and Writing Japanese," published by Tuttle.
This is an area in which the Amiga could really excel with text processing,
graphics, and sound. I hope we can develop the Amiga as THE serious
automation resource for Japanese language learning.
Mike
Thanks. I'll check those out. (I remember enough of katakana from my
VIC-20 days to get by). I'm mainly learning the rules, and flow of the
language, rather than building a vocabulary at this moment.
andy
I created some bitmap fonts for hiragana and katakana and uploaded them
about a year ago. They were straight character-for-character swaps, so
with a keymap you could use them on any bitmap oriented word processor,
such as ProWrite. It worked pretty well since with the exception of vowels
such as ya, there are no distinctions between upper and lower case, and
with about 50 characters per set plus numerals each one fits on the upper
and lower case keyboard with only a few keys to spare. If they're not still
here I can upload them again. As for kanji, I just got a scanner and will
be scanning in characters over the winter so I can make flashcards. Let me
know if you'd like them uploaded, but at 300 dpi they may be large. I have
something over 800 kanji, certainly less than 1800.
I had that tutorial back then but there was almost nothing in it. Maybe I
only had the demo version.
Mike
I only have the demo version of the tutorial, as well.
Since there seems to be a demand for the fonts, please do upload them. I
saw a file in User, Lib. 11 that is a set of IFF pictures of Japanese
fonts, but did not find the bitmapped fonts themselves.
Betty
Betty:
I checked in User, Lib 11 and they're still there. Use JAPANESE as the
keyword to search for them.
I'd love to do multiple point sizes or different styles of these, but the
only way I know to do them is with the WB1.3 version of FED. Do that for a
couple of days designing a font that's completely different from any
English font and it can ruin your whole outlook on life for a while. If
there's a better font editor or if the 2.0 version of FED is better (I
haven't tried it yet), or if somebody can explain to me how to write
outline fonts (or has software to do it) I'd be willing to give it more
work. What do you think?
Mike
I'm pretty handy with FED, and I still have a copy of Calligrapher, which
can make some pretty nice fonts. In fact, with Calligrapher, you can draw
them in Dpaint, import each character as a brush, and then turn the brushes
into characters of a font. But I don't think it is available any longer.
So far as I know, there is not an editor available for making outline
fonts. In fact, I'm not sure it would even be possible. I had started
studying outline fonts a while back, but family circumstances have made
study impossible for quite a while, so I haven't learned much about them
yet. Maybe soon.
Betty
Betty,
-> there is not an editor available for making outline fonts.
Well, there is in the Mac environment: Fontographer. Pretty nifty thing it
is too. Would love to see such a program on Ami.
Malcolm
Perhaps one of our enterprising programmers will make one?
Betty
There is an outline font editor for the Amiga – sort of. It's our InterFont
product. It lets you trace over any bitmap font with outlines of curves,
lines and hole polygons. At this time, we can convert these outline-based
fonts to 3D objects in any InterChange-supported format, to 2D clip art in
Aegis Draw and Pro Draw formats. We're in the process of updating all our
products, and one of the features we're considering for InterFont is the
ability to save these outline fonts as mono or color bitmap fonts of any
size.
I'm familiar with Fontographer on the Mac. InterFont is not based on
Bezier curves, which means it's not optimal for making Type 1 fonts, for
example. It's not a serious type-design program, either. But the
prototype for doing this works well, and generates nice looking bitmap
fonts at sizes greater than 20-30 pixels.
Do you know of any good references or information sources on
designing/writing outline fonts? If I'm going to get into this further, I
might as well produce something that's more useful than a bitmap font, so
it could be rescaled, etc.
Mike
Buy the Adobe Type 1 font specification, along with the latest (second
edition) of the Adobe PostScript Reference manual, aka the "red book".
It's now about two inches thick, not one inch like the old manual. You'd
be better off spending time and money with an existing font design program
on another platform, such as the Mac's Typographer, than writing your own
program to make them…
If there isn't anything to support 2-byte chars, then there's nothing to
"fake", is there? 🙂 Sounds like you need to write them from scratch.
You mean a 2-byte char strlen(), etc?
Jerry, 3 other Japanese character sets? I'm aware of kanji, hiragana, and
katakana, what's the fourth? It's been 20 years since I spoke Japanese
fluently and almost as long since I wrote hiragana and katakana passably
(and kanji terribly) but I only remember those three.
Are you intending to run this code on the Amiga? If so, there is the
bigger issue of character set representations and display character sets. I
am aware of at least 3 different encodings for Kanji that exist, but am not
aware of any that are supported on the Amiga.
John A. Toebes, VIII – via Whap!